–Lu Xun, “The Hurtful Death
It all just happened, without any defense. You still wonder if it was a dream. You remember it was an early summer evening, but in T-town it was more like a slow clap.
You walk with her back to her place from the quiet alley. She is a bit tired and comes back to bed, where you sit on the edge of the bed and talk to her about random topics.
It slowly gets dark outside the window, and suddenly for a split second, neither you nor she speak. You feel the room become ambiguous and depressing, and you go to turn on the light.
She whispered, “Don’t turn on the light, it’s fine.”
You feel a twinge of excitement and fear of being tempted. To break the ice, you say you’re going back in, a little tired. She gives way to the inside of the bed, “Just rest here for a while and keep me company.”
You’re a little hyper, you haven’t been this close to a woman since you were a kid. You lie obediently on the edge of the bed, afraid to make physical contact with her, and then there is a silence. In fact, you’re boiling inside.
You said, “I’ve always been afraid of women.”
“What’s there to be afraid of that will eat you?”
In the hazy darkness you see a bright light in her eyes as she moves a little toward you, and you feel her hair ruffle against your cheek as a woman’s body odor fills your nose.
You then wrap your arms around this slender waist and awkwardly kiss her forehead, her cheeks until you seek out her lips. Her lips are hot and you can’t wait to stick your tongue in to feel the sweetness of her lips and tongue. She was very cooperative with your kiss.
You keep kissing her, from her lips, to her face, to her neck, to ripping off her underwear to expose her nipples. This is what you’ve been dreaming of. You go to remove her panties in a hurry. She moans and says no, but you can’t help yourself anymore.
You roughly rip off her panties, and this snow-white flesh is presented before your eyes. You are at a loss for words. Going back to kissing her breasts, these nipples are small, pink, warm and slippery. You hastily remove your own clothing again, hastily searching for the slippery entrance.
You’re flustered and impatient. The bulging lower body can only feel the dampness beneath her. You grab her hand eagerly and ask her to help. She’s flustered, her eyes misty. You finally enter slowly, surrendering before you have a chance to feel it. Making her bottom even more slippery and sticky.
She picks up a tissue and gently wipes there, handing you a tissue as well. After that, you kiss her again, furiously. Caressing every inch of her, kissing her everywhere.
You quickly get another erection and fumble your way in. This time you feel a pleasure you’ve never experienced before. She mumbles something about how she likes you.
And you need women, you need to take it out on women, the desire and the loneliness.
You hug her and say thank you to her for making you a real man.
She whispered, “As you know, I’m not a virgin.”
Then go on to say the things you didn’t know about her until later.
You graciously say that you don’t care and that you’ll be good to her for the rest of your life.
You really didn’t care about her past at the time and in the months following this. You felt like you loved her at the time, and it’s hard to argue that you weren’t lusting after her nubile flesh.
From then on, you were together all the time, day and night, and you had crazy sex whenever you could. You learn all kinds of techniques from all kinds of sources where you can get sexual information, and it’s a sexual paradise for you and her.
You love without restraint, unleashing your passion in every place imaginable. In her bedroom and yours, in the living room, in the office, on the grass in the park, on the beach and the reef.
You are two years older than her, and you are in love with her with a hot frenzy, sometimes losing your mind. And she is constantly thinking about the future, about the fact that you are only in the heat of the moment, about some of the possible consequences. You promise to marry her, you bring her to your house like a pledge, so that your parents can meet this imaginary future daughter-in-law.
At that time you were wild, simple, desire. But you didn’t realize that you were also empty and lonely.
This kind of love lasted until you and she returned to the head office from the city where you were stationed abroad. When you first came back to the head office, you still kept the same enthusiasm, renting an apartment and buying furniture. When you meet with friends, you gradually feel the tiredness and lack of freedom that she brings to you.
When you took her to these events, you talked to your friends and she said nothing, looking lonely and pitiful. You didn’t have the heart to leave her home alone. You had to turn down your friends’ parties and live with her only in the small circle you had drawn.
At this time you have felt the gap and chasm between each other. You are the company to train the rookie, is the chairman of the general manager of the side of the red, and she is out of town to come here ordinary working girl; you have a proud education and and see the prospects, and she just want to set up a family and plain life.
You and she are communicating less and less with each other, although you are still together every day, but you say very little, just routine sex. You begin to consider whether she is your true love or not, you talk to her more and more to avoid the topic of love, about the future.
At this time, very coincidentally she was dismissed from the company at work because of a mistake, you let her rest at home, you to support him. But the feelings gradually more home desert. Woe is me, she is pregnant. She wants to give birth to this child and wants to marry you.
You finally realize or you finally have to face these problems. You don’t want to marry her, you realize that she is not suitable for you in terms of family, education, future and so on. You and her when you first started all the people around you so and you said, you then feel love is reckless, you did not listen to others persuasion, you feel their own true love of the precious, you despise those worldly ideas.
But now you’ve started judging by those same standards to justify yourself. What’s even more pathetic is that you’re dwelling on the fact that it wasn’t your first time for her, even though she agonizes that it was someone else’s rape of her when she was fourteen, and you say that she’s making it up and lying to you.
She cried. It was complete. You saw the despair.
You were afraid, afraid that she would blackmail you with the baby. You were lying to her that you loved her and wouldn’t bring up the past and that you would be good to her. In fact, you were thinking of stabilizing her first and then tricking her into aborting the baby.
During that time you resumed being nice to her, you made up all sorts of reasons why you didn’t want kids, you said you were both young and it wasn’t right to have kids so early. You swore you would marry her. She believed your words and went to the hospital for a medical abortion afterward.
You meanly said that day that a temporary company emergency had left her alone. When you came home at night you saw her lying on the bed with a pale face. You hypocritically kissed her, maybe it was your conscience, maybe it was the return of the light before the breakup, you took a week’s leave to take care of her. She often kept a happy smile on her face those days too.
But it was just a short week.
You finally said “break up” on that moonless night.
You’re doing it decisively.
She kept crying and you were silent; she scolded you and you were silent; she hit you and you were silent.
She’s desperate. She knows it’s over between you. She wants you to love her one last time. She’s on her knees begging you.
You finally say yes and you mechanically do it with her one last time, no prelude, no caresses, no kisses, bare entry. Her lower body because of the blood makes your entry smooth, and you jerk rapidly as she bursts into tears and cries silently.
It’s finally over.
You say: That’s it, it’s over between us, forever.
The blood-stained sheets bear witness to that moment. You get dressed and leave without looking back, only to hear her crying behind you.
The next day, you handed in your already written resignation and took a plane to S city in South China, you want to detach yourself from all this past life, change the number of your cell phone, and only tell a college friend in T city. You don’t want to care about that city anymore.
Until yesterday, a friend in that city told you that she had been in a car accident and had gone. Only then you went and dared to remember your past with her. You are mixed up inside, regret, guilt, sadness, and you realize that you cared for her, while at the same time there is a hint of happiness deep inside you.
Is this how you wanted it to end?
Who the hell are you?
Are you a man or a devil?
And what is this love?
2003/10/26