Qiu Miaojin - Last Words from Montmartre

Xu, my beloved Xu, I now understand how to treat the people closest to me, in relationships both past and present. I understand now, but it’s been a slow process, taking ten years of work. Now when I meet people I can place them quite clearly into this framework. After three years I’ve finally balanced my accounts. I understand my mistakes, my character flaws, and how to treat you well. I hope the results of this accounting can be woven into the fabric of our future…. Does this realization mean I will die young? That I have suddenly come to grasp all this reasoning, does it mean I will die young?

I long to return to our former “intimacy.” I constantly ask myself where in this whole process did we lose our “intimacy.”…

I’d say our problems started when I moved to the Foyer International. We wouldn’t share such a profound mutual understanding again. I was living my utter failure of a life in Paris. I had lost faith in life and in our relationship. (Glancing over at the goodbye letters I wrote you from the Foyer… oh pathetic, pathetic love.) I wavered between two extremes: I wanted so much to live with you, but I also wanted you to be far away so I could stop obsessing about you. This frustrated you and you didn’t know how to deal with me in my confusion, while I felt hurt that you didn’t understand the position I was in, and helpless because you couldn’t make up your mind. I was so vulnerable back then that I actually believed I couldn’t survive the stasis between desire and loneliness…. I remember visiting you in April and being so utterly disappointed with you. I thought you didn’t love me, and that you prioritized your job, your family, and everything everything everything in the world over me. You weren’t even willing to spend your vacations in Paris. You said that you were just humoring me when you talked about coming to Paris (granted, this was a long-standing tradition of yours); I was right all along about the thoughts behind your feelings. Back then, at least, you were willing to say you’d come see me. Not anymore — now you can’t wait for me to disappear and leave you alone. Back then, I had limited resources in Paris; I didn’t have as many friends as I do now, and my French wasn’t good enough to ameliorate my loneliness, my frustration. I had “used up all my arrows and was out of provisions,” and couldn’t endure a life of solitude, of waiting and longing for you. The only choice I had was to cut you off, but in reality it was just an attempt to escape my desperate longing for you.

But there was no escape. I felt like a gorilla shackled in leg-irons, struggling to break out with all my might, head wounded, streaming blood, but to no avail. The pain erupted like molten lava, scorching and melting away all our “intimacy.” You didn’t make up your mind in time. You couldn’t figure out how to be with me. So my furious fucking anger obliterated any childlike “faith” you had in me, and your uncompromising coldness toward me deepened. I believe you hated me, too, and this hatred was expressed as coldness. And here I’ve arrived at the crux of the matter. It was at this point your eros started to split into bits of love and desire. You still gave me some pieces of this “love” by taking care of me physically, but soon your hatred began to manifest itself as indifference, rejection, a shutting down. So my desire became unhinged and my pain excruciating. When you stop wanting me — withdrawing your eros — I go insane, truly insane. I’ve reached an apex of insanity (ha ha). Why am I laughing? Because I have a fatal, mortal, terminal passion for you. Ultimately I have no choice but death: an unconditional allegiance, an eternal bond to you. (The ultimate rule of desire/eros is this: At their peak, “sexual desire” [erotic desire], “desire for love” [romantic longing], and “desire for death” [the death wish] are the same.) I’m a passionate person, and as you’re someone I would die for, death seems inevitable, though it’s still painful thinking about it. Just the words “not having your ‘desire for love’” crushes my heart, really crushes it (not a mere injury)…. I welcomed the care you showed me but whenever I sensed that deep down you didn’t love me, I lost it. That’s why my “desire for love” could grow even stronger while I also became suspicious of you, lashed out at you, and developed a neurosis and deteriorated…. As this happens, the hostile side of you that you’ve kept hidden began to be cruel, selfish, unfaithful, and declared relentlessly that you were leaving me and, most chilling words of all, that you didn’t love me. I turned into a sniper, as we both became so entrenched in our adversarial relationship that the most negative qualities of our personalities were pushed to their extremes. The sad thing is that neither of us could stop the momentum of careening toward the abyss, though ironically we still yearned to treat (or “love”) each other with kindness….

Having been through so much, and though my body is wracked with pain, I must point out two things of profound significance. These are the most painful and difficult realizations to articulate. First: I knew I had lost you the first time I hit you. I sobbed hard inside, silently aware that I had pushed you past the point of no return. I spent my days tortured by terrors and nightmares: terror of losing you, terror of being dumped, nightmares of your infidelity. Controlling the urge to hit you was so excruciating that I had to hurt myself in terrible ways. I still have dreams where I wake up crying. Second: Sexually, you completely rejected me in Paris. You didn’t have the slightest sexual desire for me, the slightest wish to make love to me. This went on for nearly a month before I could admit it, and when I think about it I still weep. I can’t believe we fucked up our relationship up to this extreme. It hurts so much I can barely speak. It hurts so much that whenever I’m about to remember Clichy I feel a shock like I’ve just touched a live electric wire. It hurts. It hurts.

Then I decided to forget you, to transform myself into someone entirely different from my old self: a vital personality. Suddenly it seemed so easy, so entirely possible to imagine. It would be so easy to cast off the defining features of my old self that I couldn’t rid myself of before….

Since returning from Tokyo, I can feel the nature of my sexuality changing, gradually changing, a tectonic change so mysterious and private that I initially wasn’t sure what was happening or what triggered it. I could feel myself “becoming a woman” (according to some basic biological definition of “woman,” anyway) or perhaps just becoming a Woman. My period became extremely regular. One morning I was dreaming about you and I suddenly woke up. I thought I had gotten my period, and in fact I had, precisely at the same time. It felt like a mysterious connection. I also dreamed I had long “feminine” hair, and in the dream I was aware that I was enjoying my appearance and that my face was becoming more beautiful (a “feminine” sort of beauty). Once, Qing Jin looked intently at my face and told me I was very beautiful in a way that could be attractive to both men and women. In the dream I could actually sense that my facial features and my behavior were becoming more feminine. My sexuality also began to take on a more “receptive” quality. I still fantasized about you, but the way I had loved you and made love to you now seemed more of a desire for you to love me and make love to me…. And I felt a sexual relationship with a man was possible (just the sex). Or perhaps I should say, I was starting to mis/understand that a perfect sexual relationship could be possible with a warm, sincere man (someone with a quality of “pure” masculinity, like Eric from the doctoral program). The possibilities multiplied so fast in such a short time that I couldn’t grasp it. I frightened myself with the thought that an intellectual and spiritual man like Eric might materialize and find me attractive and then I’d really “become a woman.” It was entirely possible; I had changed into another person. I was scared to death as it was a way, the perfect way, to escape from my erotic and romantic desires for you. What frightened me wasn’t the lure of lust or of betraying you but of leaving you. The lure of silently, with hardly a breath, taking leave of your life and disappearing forever in a kind of eternal self-cancellation, so that you could never find me again (I always seem to be looking for some sort of “absolute” way of loving you or being loved by you).