Notes of a Crocodile

Love resides in no ending

“She was my only passage for breathing into the outside world.”
That was the first thing I knew about this book.
Because of that line, I came to read it.

Reading Qiu Miaojin is dangerous—
or so the internet says.
Her words begin to hurt the moment you open the book.
The “I” of the story loves with a terrible lucidity;
love is torn open, crushed, and laid before us—naked, withholding nothing.
On my first reading, I did not even know
what she was trying to say.

When I finished the book, still absorbed in its protagonist,
I picked up the dust jacket I had removed on the pretext that it got in the way.
“Died at only twenty-six.”
Only then did my heart ache in the most literal, physical sense.

This was the first book about love I had ever read;
I had ventured so little into this terrain.
I spent half an hour merely trying to shape this piece,
not knowing how to begin, or how writing might undo the tragedy.

“Her acceptance of me amounts to a denial of the self I deny.”
Strange: I understood that knotted sentence the first time I read it.
I am always denying myself.
As the book says:
“The whole world can love me; it is useless. I hate myself.”
Sometimes I do hate myself—for not being good enough, not being strong enough.
Yet someone loves me and, with a single sentence, can soothe the conflict I have worried at all day.
I fold myself into a letter that refuses to be unfolded,
while someone gently lifts my edges with the tweezers of their gaze.

“An embrace is a long wound, a tearless song of parting.”
I like embraces. I even crave them.
Of course, it depends on the person. Wanting physical touch always feels somehow shameful; at least, I have not yet learned how to ask.

To fall in love with women is easy.
Qiu Miaojin is a woman who knows how to love women.
I am not. This has nothing to do with desire;
it is simply that, at the level of love, women are always compelling.
What draws us is prettiness, and beauty.
What is the difference between the two?
Prettiness is a gift bestowed by heaven and by our genes;
beauty is a miracle we create for ourselves.

The chains that bind certain souls
cannot be undone by the meager, unfinished contents of this one life.
Then remain entangled with me,
until the person I am begins to mean something to you.