Notes of a Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

  My thoughts were awry. Separation awaited regardless of which way I turned, ready to reduce me to a baby chick shivering in the rain. My eyes welled over to the sounds of “Thanksgiving,” and I set my bottle of beer down between my legs. My tears were not those of pain, but of remorse and acceptance. Separation was the thing I’d been dreading the most these past few years, and I’d been in denial that it was a fact of life. Refusing to let go, I’d practically thrown a temper tantrum. What’s worse, my attempts to avoid separation had only hastened it. It explained why I’d always been so quick to lash out at those I loved. My realization was akin to discovering the lost city of Atlantis.

  In my navy blue sweatpants, I strolled back to the main road. By day, the streets of Taipei were noisy, congested, and putrid, but at night the scene was tranquil. I sat down on the steps of the pedestrian bridge. I’d spent countless lonely nights atop countless bridges, thinking about the people I loved, the people who made me who I was. I knew I’d been here before, on this bridge illuminated in purple. These bridges were all the same, and I’d sat like this before, with my arms around my knees, watching the world below.

  The beer tasted bitter. God knows how much I’d drunk in the two years I lived alone, but it was clear I’d been having one long, silent cry. I simply hadn’t thought of it that way before. Then it hit me: If I died, what difference would it make to the world? After all, no matter who I was, my death would be no more significant, nor would I be spared from lonely nights. And really, what difference did the world make to me, anyway? With that question, something stirred deep inside me, making my body tremble. It did make a difference. I had needs like anyone else, and sure, one of those needs was a little acknowledgment. But the problem was the way I loved: It was the very cause of my pain.

  A second later, I was leaning over the side of the bridge retching. My stomach had purged itself, leaving a sour taste in my mouth. I had to let go of the people I loved. The words came with a mouthful of vomit—in one violent lurch, as if my jaws were pried open and the contents of my stomach were ejected, leaving only the whimpering mess that was me. The image of a tomb flashed in mind, and I knew it contained all that was dear to me. It was shown to me like a geoglyph, a giant symbol of my connections to the universe at large.

  I wailed. No matter how loudly I sobbed, the sound was drowned out by the noise of passing cars. I’d taken everyone I loved and killed them off in my heart, one by one. I’d long been tending their graves—secretly visiting and mourning during the day, going out and erecting a cross on starry nights, lying inside and awaiting my own death on starless nights. That was my Atlantis, the kingdom I’d built in the name of separation. I’d never before unearthed so much of myself, and so suddenly at that. Inside the world of my tomb, everyone else was dead, I alone survived, and that was the reason for my sorrow.

  It didn’t take long to spot the largest sarcophagus. It was the one in which Shui Ling had been entombed, and across the front, it read: This woman is madly in love with me. And then reality finally hit me. I had my old schema (which offered a peephole, really) to blame for my decision to leave this woman, to kill her and preserve her body in this sarcophagus, where she’d stay mine forever. I’d evaded the perils of real relationships and robbed her of the ability to change with time. These two prospects had given rise to my deep-rooted fear of a real separation, which in turn yielded the avoidant mentality that had only hastened it.

  That’s where I was after eighteen months. I didn’t want to see or talk to her, and I’d no longer allow her to set foot in my world. The paradox, of course, was that my love for her would grow. Her corpse would remain in a sarcophagus where I kept her closer than I could in reality. And I continued believing in that unchanging world, which I was at peace with. It was as if Shui Ling simply went on living her life, and it made no difference whatsoever to me.

  But Shui Ling was living her life here in the same city as me, there was no doubt about that. So then what?

  2

  1989. Shui Ling. Gongguan Road. My Romantic Tragedy, round two.

  “There—it’s for you!”

  It was a winter morning in a season identical to the year before. I’d just finished a swimming lesson and was shivering from the cold. On that rare occasion when I’d woken up early, the athletic fields were covered in a layer of dew. I was riding down the sidewalk when a bicycle cut across my path—a letter was tossed into my basket before the bicycle turned and sped off. I almost squealed. It was Shui Ling.

  “What are you doing here?” Pedaling fast to catch up to her, I managed to find the warm and gracious tone I’d always reserved for her. I’d imagined this scenario a million times before, and now it was happening. Over the past eighteen months, I’d spotted her on campus from a distance from time to time. Having been burned once, I’d decided to make a break for it if she actually approached me. I was sure that if she started talking to me, I would die. I never expected to stay so calm. It felt as if my tears were absorbed by a giant bath towel before they could seep out, and there I was, as cheerful as ever.

  She didn’t notice me, and yet she didn’t seem entirely focused on riding, either. She stared at the road ahead, pedaling slowly, as if in a trance, oblivious to the sights and sounds around her. Her purple scarf. I was supposed to be the masculine one, and yet her elegance in a simple scarf and jeans left me weak at the knees. I rode alongside her until we reached the intersection. No matter how I tried to coax her, she continued straight ahead. As I waited for her to cross, my now softened heart was wrung by the thought of being involved with her again. I stopped and watched her ride into the distance.

  I went home. After intense deliberation, I headed back to campus and sat behind her in class. Unable to look away from her, I stared furtively instead. Her expression hadn’t changed. Engrossed in the lecture, she seemed to be off in some faraway place, and it only stirred pangs of misery inside me. I squinted. She was within arm’s reach, yet there was a canyon between us. I could practically touch her, but every time I summoned all my strength to sidle up to her, to reach out to her, I imagined myself backing away again and again. All I could do was stare.

  She’d been silently resisting me for a while now. She wanted to avoid me, to get away from me. Meanwhile I was trailing her like a spider gliding along a thread. The purple envelope she’d dropped in my basket contained a vaguely sad poem conveying the sentiment that it was meant to turn out this way. And with that, the conflicting forces of attraction and repulsion were set off, desire was piqued in a mix of rapture and pain—and I completely lost myself.

  She walked with her head lowered, casting a glare my way a few times. Once we reached the lakefront, she stopped and turned to face me. Her eyes widened. A sudden boldness eclipsed her shyness. “What do you want?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied, feeling at once innocent and prepared to show my old brazenness. I knew I had her.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” she snapped.

  One moment her temper flared, and the next she’d broken into a self-indulgent smile. She turned toward the lake and sat down on the white metal bench, poking a finger through the yarn of her red sweater. Her face slowly flushed.

  “Sorry, I lost control for a second. You pedaled right past me out of nowhere. I wanted to see where you were going.”

  “You lost control? Tell me, what do you expect me to do when you lose control?”

  “If things have changed, fine. But if they haven’t, then why can’t they be like they were before?”

  “No. Not like before.” She shook her head forcefully. Her expression was stern and unforgiving, as if I’d done something dreadfully wrong.

  “I’m with someone else now.”

  Those unexpected words came out as she shook her head frantically. For the past three years, every fall had been the same. The wind had swept across the surface of Drunken Moon Lake. The surrounding trees had swayed in a verdant mass as the lake quivered lightly. The vivid sensations
of the season had filled my lungs, invigorating me. Last year, and the year before that, I’d stood alone in the middle of an autumn field, a fleck of color, a minute consciousness within the vastness of nature. Now that consciousness was jolted by her words, and it widened in a blur, erasing me.

  Like a pair of lovers who’d been exiled to opposite ends of the earth, we’d tearfully embraced each other. But in the end, I was left standing alone on that autumn field.

  Her resentment toward me hadn’t been evident earlier, but now I understood her pain. If I were to bemoan the fact that she had found someone else, she too would understand my pain. It was the final standoff between two beasts. The bare teeth of one tore into the flesh of the other in an expression of love commingled with hatred. Incapable of licking each other’s wounds, the two of us could only stand face-to-face and lament.

  And as if that were not enough, the new someone was a woman. The words cut into me, leaving me speechless.

  Shui Ling said that just a few days ago, on her birthday, she had been given a ring by that new someone. She had agreed to go out with her and even promised to study abroad together. While I was secretly leaving roses on Shui Ling’s doorstep, she was returning home from a candlelit dinner wearing that other person’s ring, glowing with renewed desire. Before that, she’d been waiting day and night for a sign. Once again, out of panic, she’d made an impetuous decision and was tied down before she knew it.

  She’d waited for me for ten months, she said with a smirk. Her gaze was stiff. After the two of us had been practically inseparable, and after the excruciating heartbreak that had followed, she’d fled into someone else’s arms. They were like daggers, her eyes. So she found someone who was better at intimacy than I was. But she didn’t want a man. That would only mar her pristine memories of me, she said. We’d always be together in her heart, even if she was with someone else. No one could take that away from her, especially not me here and now.

  My heart ached. I felt guilty for having put her through such an ordeal. I felt bad for driving her away with my latent self-destructive behavior. Yet out of this morbid, deranged love of hers that pained me to the bone, out of fear of losing the entire significance of our past, she was treating the present me with violent animosity.

  God I wished I was dead. This woman had to be part of some hellish eternal recurrence.

  3

  January 4, 1989

  Shui Ling,

  Now it’s my turn to tell you something. I spent my twentieth birthday all alone. I wanted to die, but that didn’t happen. I didn’t throw myself off the side of a cliff. I vowed to do it but didn’t have the will to follow through. As I stood on the edge, you took hold of my heart, and suddenly I realized that somewhere in this great big world, there really was a you that loved me. For a long time, you and my family were the only ones who loved me, who would do anything for me, but it wasn’t the real me. No one loved the real me, and it caused me suffering. You’re the only one who knows my pain. I once bared my soul to you. Your love saw past the mess that I was. So in the end, I don’t know why I only remember your love hurting me. That notion backed me into a corner, told me there was no place for me out there.

  In the past I never understood. Then I had a devastating realization: I’d been shown what was off-limits. I didn’t have the strength to die, and the one thing I was secretly living for was the very thing that I wouldn’t let myself have. I was headed astray as it was. The secret burned inside me, but because I failed to understand it, I allowed the thing I wanted to elude reality.

  So I found my way back. That’s right: I came back. I’ve made a complete turnaround since those days. I want to care for you. I want us to have a real connection again. I used to be afraid of living, and now all I ever feel is the will to live. But just like that, I was released from my mortal fear of what I truly wanted. I wasn’t trying to change anything by giving you roses on your birthday. Maybe you think it’s silly, but doing that kind of thing only proves that I don’t need to stop having feelings for you.

  After eighteen months apart, I came back and stood at the wrought-iron gates to your door, calm and collected. I knew you were out and about, that there was no need to chase you down. You were a part of my world, behind its own gates. That’s how things were when we were together, when nothing could keep us apart. I told myself that no matter what became of our relationship, I could always return to that sacred place. The thought of it became like a guardian angel by my side, and it seemed as if nothing could ever come between us.

  You loved me. I couldn’t grasp that, and this inability was at the core of my death wish. I never believed that anyone could love the real me—not even you.

  Why didn’t I get it? That has to do with my own issues. Ever since I was little and started to learn what it meant to love, I never understood that I had to love me too—otherwise, what was the point? If I wanted to join the rest of humanity, the only solution was gradually to reveal my secret. I would begin to construct what was in my internal blueprint. There was no other way I could go on. For me, it was a matter of life and death, and of pain.

  You know that I fall in love with women, that it’s how I was designed. What you don’t know is how I suffered during that year with you. There’s no way you’ll ever comprehend how painful it was for me to be alive. My self-actualization was forbidden. That was why I had to leave you.

  I once said you were so happy that it made me feel lonely. But the truth is, I was so hardened by pain that you couldn’t touch me. Relying on only a lover’s intuition, the way a blind man reads a cluster of braille, you reached for me, but your touch was painful, and it broke me down a little more every time. You were like acid on my limestone, unaware of how hardened I was. My sense of self had begun to disintegrate, and so I had to flee. Still, you know nothing of how it transformed me, nor do you realize how I altered your destiny.

  For you, being in love with a woman is natural, the same as being in love with a man. You didn’t believe in unhappy endings, much less admit that misfortune lay ahead, awaiting you. So you took the agony in my eyes to be part of my tragic disposition, and as in any lopsided romance, you partook of the happiness.

  But I’m like a father to you, only younger. A lover with a beautiful soul, nothing special about it. For you, it was an ordinary happiness. I was the one who shouldered the burden when we experienced two discrete halves of the love we shared.

  My world is one of tainted sustenance. I love my own kind—womankind. From the moment my consciousness of love was born, there was no hope of cure. And those four words—no hope of cure—encapsulate my state of suffering to this day. My condition is one that will keep me in shackles for life.

  My desires led me to sample a cuisine known as woman, and I got hooked. Confronted with my own inclination, I saw three possible courses of action: (1) Undergo a change of diet; (2) Invent an antidote; (3) Try the old “substitute” trick. Undergo a change of diet. With this approach, I try to find the will to overturn my fate before even getting involved. I spent all spring in isolation, basking in my desires, having realized it was futile to try to repress one orientation and adopt another. I was able to contain my fears to a certain extent, for a time.

  Here’s a delusional and misguided hypothesis: If I could just fall in love with a man, it would put an end to the anguish of having fallen in love with a woman by somehow overwriting that earlier consciousness. Falling in love with a man and falling in love with a woman are two completely different things. My attraction to women has materialized, and regardless of whether it becomes a thing of the past, it’s a part of me. By the same token, the part of me battling that attraction has been around even longer. It’s like taking a bucket of black dye and adding other colors to it, hoping to change black into a different color. You can try, but you’ll never succeed.

  I’ll never fall in love with a man, just as most men can’t simply fall in love with another man. Ultimately, a forced change of diet is demeaning. I discovere
d who I was through not being readily accepted by society. My identity was fully formed long before I was ever actualized, and it wasn’t going to change even if I kicked and screamed. When it reached the point where I couldn’t take it anymore, I entered a state of denial and started injuring myself. Do you understand what I’ve been going through?

  I was in love with you. I wanted to give myself to you. The benefit of hindsight makes retracing this story even more painful. When Gide left his wife, he told her in a parting letter, “At your side, I have nearly rotted.” And then he freed himself to love. It was too late to find a cure: Decay had already set in.

  During those six short months when there were feelings between us, I became a monster. That monster caressed you, its paws held you, and its maw pressed against you in a kiss. With its monster desires, it lusted after your body. It took in the adoration and admiration in your eyes, which reflected nothing of the monster’s shadow. The experience, every bit of it, brutally scathed me.

  I’m unworthy of loving you. I’ve struggled to find self-worth, but I can’t expel the monster’s consciousness still lurking beneath my skin. If my self-worth was already wounded, my experience with you only put salt in that wound.

  You opened a realm that exposed me. The deeper and harder I fell for you, the more grotesque I felt. The shackles that had been holding me down were removed. But in my mind, the monster’s face had taken over. Every night since the birth of this monster, I lay in horror, unable to sleep. I groaned in agony, a patient trapped in a slowly dying body.

  I didn’t know whether I’d arrived at a final self-discovery or just a bend in the road, but my instinct was to retreat. Arrows were loaded onto a bow and fired fast into the field called romantic love. In a violent, pent-up fury of self-hatred and insecurity, I’d stretched the bow taut. Then, after an internal tussle, came a state of perfect calm. The force applied to the bow was enough to shoot clean through my target, and with a single arrow our fates intermingled in a pool of blood. From there, I resorted to my nefarious ways, chopping you to pieces despite your sobbing and pleading, and savagely tossing the parts in the woods. Your eyes, which shed innocent tears in the wake of horror, never showed anything but unyielding trust in me.