Notes of a Crocodile

"From the look in her eyes in the dream, I know she doesn't blame me. She resents me. There's a rift between us, but she has to learn not to lament for the dead. It's like being struck in the heart with an arrow. I's not about the arrow. The fact is, the damage is done."

"Whoa! You're not offended, are you? How about if the three of us agree to have post-gender relations? I'm done talking about it. In the end, all three of us have been seriously warped by gender labels.”

I liked these two. And I knew that they liked me. There was no romantic interest whatsoever in that like. As for how much I liked them, the two of them were perhaps my very favorites out of all the people to whom that word applied. I liked them as individuals. I liked them even more when they were together. Were I a fanatical collector of figurines, these two would be my most prized pair.

"You start to fight the second you see each other. Does that mean it's mutual love or bitter hatred?"

"Doesn't Hsia Yü have a poem called 'Sweet Revenge? I only mention it because I thought you might know it. It's like the title says. Because love goes hand in hand with hatred, and because there's hatred, you're going to fight, and when you fight, you see that there's love. The three become inseparable.“

The first time I saw you, I knew I would fall in love with you. That my love would be wild, raging, and passionate, but also illicit. That it could never develop into anything, and in-stead, it would split apart like pieces of a landslide. As flesh and blood, I was not distinct. You turned me into my own key, and when you did, my fears seized me in a flood of tears that soon abated. I stopped hating myself and discovered the corporeal me.

She didn't understand. Didn't understand she could love me, maybe that she already did love me. Didn't understand that beneath the hide of a lamb was a demonic beast that had to suppress the urge to rip her to shreds. Didn't understand that love, every little bit of it, was about exchange. Didn't understand that she caused me suffering. Didn't understand that love was like that.

I said, Can we start over? She turned around. The ocean wept. I knew it was mutual love.

The fact is, most people go through life without ever living. They say you have to learn how to construct a self who remains free in spite of the system. And you have to get used to the idea that it’s every man for himself in this world. It requires a strange self-awareness, whereby everything down to the finest detail must be performed before the eyes of the world.

Whether I was sitting or running around or lying down, my mind was filled with things I wanted to talk to Xiao Fan about. In my heart, I talked to her all day long. The sheer volume of these conversations was too much to contain. They were practically oozing out of me, incapacitating me. My body had entered overproduction mode. Its mostly unsaleable products were piled in a warehouse, and the warehouse soon had to be demolished.

Shui Ling, this separation has to be. Four months later, I’m in a completely different place.

On how to love well: Instead of embracing a romantic ideal, you must confront the meaning of every great love that has shattered, shard by shard.

Of all my memories, my memory of her is the single most beautiful. It should be evident by now that I can’t conceivably depict this woman. In writing this much, I’ve already condemned myself to failure and done her an injustice. It amounts to nothing more than a sham, and I’ve gritted my teeth trying all the while. There’s a raw passion that still lives in my blood, still courses through my veins. The mere thought of her fills me with enough desire to send me into a mad frenzy. Yet this memory is also the saddest and most painful of all, for I never really knew this woman’s heart, and I never would.

She’d ask me why I was sitting next to her, and I’d say because you’re smart. She’d also ask me why her. I’d say because you’re so beautiful. She said maybe you don’t know that I have nothing to offer you. I said doesn’t matter, other women don’t want me. She said you can’t handle me. I said let’s cross that bridge when we get there.

“in the past two years, I’ve become a woman. Nothing’s the same anymore. I’m not pure anymore. I can’t face her now. I just want our sweetest memories to stay in the past. That was probably the one time when it was totally pure. She’s the only one who made me live fearlessly.”

There are many important images in my mind that were captured at strange twists and turns, during the passage from one stage to the next, accumulating a weight I never expected. But I never did say goodbye or thank you to all the people in those images. With a stiff upper lip, I stood back and watched as they slipped out of my life.

“I have to jab you. I don’t want to be close to you because you’ll taint the memory in my heart. . . .” Her stare, brimming with hatred, said that she no longer knew me. “I won’t let you. No one can. It’s mine alone. You abandoned me and left me out in the cold. All I have left now is the you that I created, and it’s the best you there is. . . .”

She had tied me up with wire and left me to die. But when all was said and done, she wanted me to die in her arms. So before entering my dreams every night, she yanked the wire tight to make sure I was still there.

my high school years, filled with secret crushes and the camaraderie of friends who laughed and cried together, later torn apart in the process of growing up. Even if we had prevented that estrangement, our former kindredness would be replaced by a pained silence if we were to meet again. My college years were spent among people who were like oil in water, unable to form bonds. A few friends had broken through my shell and made me less alienated, but I didn’t treat them well, and it was my loss. My only salvation—Shui Ling—was as short-lived as a rainbow. What the two of us had was an achievement on par with landing on the moon, then floating in space with zero gravity. Images of all these people flooded my mind. Some emotion of mine—whether love, pain, or sorrow—had been preserved in each of their faces. But there was no escaping separation, which was left to the mercy of fate. One by one, those dearest to me had disappeared, and my memories, which I had so closely guarded, were ultimately of little consolation.

Twenty. I was stuck in a rut and feeling hopeless. I couldn’t go on.

“From the look in her eyes in the dream, I know she doesn’t blame me. She resents me. There’s a rift between us, but she has to learn not to lament for the dead. It’s like being struck in the heart with an arrow. It’s not about the arrow. The fact is, the damage is done.”

I’d wrongly assumed that I, having played the role of protector far too often, was overreacting the way a parent frets over a child getting sick. But no, this was an important turning point for me. For a long time, my hidden shame had made me push everyone away. I’d rejected them before they could reject me. I ran away from close relationships even with the people who loved me. I was a blind man fallen into the ocean. I’d taken the mirror and smashed it to pieces, unable to stand the sight of my hideous, disfigured self.

So I didn’t need Shui Ling, then? She’d become the mythical goddess Nüwa—a snail of a woman curled up inside a shell somewhere beyond my recollection. I dove down to a coral reef at the bottom of the sea, a long, grueling journey to a place where all kinds of caves could be found. The reef was a microcosm of deep-sea consciousness, from its pink bud-like tentacles to the moist, black marrow of its skeleton. Whenever I ventured into the wrong cave, the snail woman would emerge from her shell to temper my alcohol-hardened brain, mending the membrane layer where freshly spawned desires were being sundered by a death wish.

It was hard enough to demolish just one little part. It hurt everyone, including me. To make up for it, I let them form a new image of me. It’s been a constant struggle. I’ll always feel love for them and have basic needs to be met, so it takes courage to draw the line. But if I don’t, my love for them and my needs will become bargaining chips that I have to exchange for my independence. And using those would be like retreating before the battle’s even begun.

That guardedness was a by-product of my lifelong socialization, of other people labeling me and putting me in a box.

I knew there was no way I could protect her from the real world or from being yanked around by the tail. That said, I’d still step in and save her regardless. I was such a shitty human being, why not take advantage of her state of disgrace and kick her while she was down? No matter what kind of trouble she was in, I’d run over in an instant to toss a rope down and pull her back to safety. Now that I’d shown myself to be blindly at her beck and call, she was beaming again.