Qiu Miaojin - Last Words from Montmartre

Xu, my most beloved Xu, how can I finally make you understand what I’ve experienced firsthand of our “tree of love”? Xu, listen to me. You’re my life, you’re my everything. I belong to you, past, present, and future, and forever and forever more. The words “to belong” have been there from the beginning but I didn’t understand until now that it meant you. What I understood as “to belong” was very different and had nothing to do with you, nor with your impoverished love. There was no comparison for me. “To belong” to anyone — it’s not a choice. “To love you” is a suffocating form of fate for me. It upsets me that you aren’t maturing at the same pace as me, because it’s you, Xu — any sentient being can see that I belong to you and no one else. Here is my life bound. I am ready to accept my fate.

Though sometimes I sigh to the heavens for sending me someone to belong to who matures at such a vastly different pace, in truth there are also times I can’t stand how you treat me; lately, especially, I’ve felt unloved and cursed, and as much as you treat me like an enemy, and as much as I sense your cold indifference, all these things are part of a story where everything happens for a reason and sentiment is genuine. Hard to say whether I’d like you now. Who were you this year — someone who deserved my love? I refuse to believe that this year’s “you” represents the whole you. Because I understand you. I understand your maturation process. I can predict what gifts and what challenges lie ahead of you. And I know the effect my irrational explosions had on you. Your loathing for me, your disgust — you weren’t born that way. So I refuse to cut you out of my life entirely. You won’t always be like this. I’m convinced that you’re going to grow until you’re even better than your past self — the self that loved me completely. And more important, when you dumped me and I was nearly trampled to death I finally understood that my love for you was no disease, no; it didn’t mean I was dependent on you, nor was I in love with you for purely physical reasons, nor did you fall in love with me because I’m so fabulous. No, our love was bigger: It was fate. I have no idea when you’ll sense this aspect of fate, but you will. I am part of your fate. Whether our love is worth it or not is irrelevant. So what if there’s someone nicer than you or prettier than you — it doesn’t change a thing. Come and hurt me more. You still mean the same to me: I belong to you.

Anger has turned me into a disgusting creature, and since you don’t love me and you continue to hurt me, I treat you like an enemy. I tell myself I must first transform the animosity and resentment in my heart, or try to persuade you to transform these things, so I can start treating you with goodness again, and you could regain your previous state of beauty and kindness; it’s as if I have to wipe the dirt off your face so you can reveal your original face to me.

After your nastiness worsened to the point where I hated you and you hurt me worse still, it’s not that I lost all my willpower or wasn’t free to walk out the door; in fact the more I understand what you really mean to me, the more determined I become and the freedom I have to distance myself from your cruelty grows. Love is not merely need alone, and what is more important is loving you, and making my true nature comprehensible to you.

Even far away I still belong to you. The location of my love will never change; nobody else can occupy that space. Distance isn’t a means to abandon you; I can’t bear the way you treat me. My unwillingness to remain in a relationship that has turned ugly and completely resists my good nature may also convince you to admit your mistakes. I won’t indulge your dishonesty or bad behavior. I’ll find a way to tell you when you’re behaving badly. I just hope you won’t leave me and will let me love you forever and let yourself always be loved by me so we can cultivate a love for eternity. I hope I won’t be forced to leave you because I can’t take it anymore…. I’ve already lost you. I’ve got nothing more to lose. Even if you were to marry someone else and have children, or even if you died, I couldn’t lose any more than I already have. Do you understand this at all?

One can talk endlessly about the sorrows of life, but only art can express it precisely…. I’ve felt sorry for you, I’ve felt sorry for others I have loved, and I’ve felt sorry for myself, but this sorrow is not a burden I can share with you anymore as it only brings more sorrow thinking about how we used to share these things with each other. Yes, we used to share life’s annoyances, frustrations, pain, beauty, new experiences, new discoveries, our thoughts about each other, our yearning, love, tenderness, and adoration; yes, Xu, my deepest and most beautiful love, even though in the past there were times you couldn’t entirely comprehend my views, and even though I became frustrated with your perceptions of me and I casually negated your shallow experience, still, over the past two years and eight months, we actually united to become one self that could share the joys and pain of life. And this compound self was something I couldn’t abandon even if I died: It was our love. I’m sad that you’ve discarded this compound self, and I’m sad that you no longer want to share the joys and burdens of life with me. I am sad, so much endless sadness….

P.S. I found the envelope I had prepared for my fifth letter, which I had thought I’d already mailed by accident, so I put my tenth letter here in the fifth letter’s envelope.

MAY 20

Xu,

My soul is lonely, lonely in a lonely way that I’m unwilling to express to you. How can I describe the depth of my loneliness to someone who cast away my soul, cast away my life, brought me to the brink of death without a care in the world, someone who caused me such catastrophic suffering with hardly a care, and cruelly condemned me to live alone, in another country far from home. I hate you a little less now, but there is still this profound loneliness.

I’ve tried to reconcile the paradoxical forces of love and hate, so razor-sharp, that you’ve driven into my heart, and I have struggled silently, alone. While your hurting me, your cheating on me — your acting out in those ways — have lessened, understanding you, let alone trusting you, is still beyond me. You’re used to being passive, comfortable hiding in silence. Even the effort of uttering a single word or really the effort of any action to ease my pain is too much for you, so that for you the most natural, the most “peaceful” solution is to let me waste away. I’ll never understand how you became so cold and so cruel, as if you’ve convinced yourself that coldness and cruelty are part of your true nature. As if you’re so self-righteous that you won’t even allow me to return to my own country, so as to keep me from interfering with your life or “hurting you.” Forgive me for being so open.

I often ask myself: Do I have the courage to let “tragedy” happen again? Qing Jin once said that life is full of rupture and that it is what it is. But does it really have to be this way? Everyone I’ve ever loved has treated me poorly. And when I was younger I treated others poorly too. Why? Why do people have to act so mean and stupid toward the ones they love? Can’t we be a little more introspective and reach a level of self-awareness to stop hurting the ones we love? It must be possible. Mutual meanness and stupidity cause human tragedy and rupture to keep recurring. But I suspect this wouldn’t work in my life anyway: Someone should just insert a caesura into the score of my life. So that there’ll be no more tragedy or rupture , or at least it would be contained to a lesser degree and lighten my burden.