Mr. S:

I can no longer quite remember what year it was that I met you. The two of us should now be called a man and a woman who have just barely grown up; but back when we first met, we were really just two big kids. Actually, we’re not all that old even now — we’ve simply been put back into our own separate worlds, each living through different, fuller measures of joy and pain. But I still believe you love me, and I love you too, even though I know your name was just something randomly assembled for me out of the 2,000 most common Chinese characters.

Love is the only bridge sustaining the relationship between you and me now, crossing over the obstacles of geography and the friction of incompatible ideas. To many people this would seem astonishing, and to science students it would seem unbelievable too, but we just go on quietly doing it anyway. Although at times it looks like a kite with a snapped string, exchanging messages of feeling only sporadically, irregularly, that thin thread-like feeling might just be exactly the mutual need between you and me.

I’ve done a great many things behind your back with other people. I’ve never regretted it, and I will never let you know. Because no matter how time flows on, no matter the spring departing and the autumn arriving, what my heart turns toward is you and only you. Maybe it’s a kind of letting things drift, but we reached some abstract, unspoken agreement about the imbalance in our feelings, a tacit understanding we could simply keep living by — which, given that we’re both Libras, counts as something of a miracle. I don’t feel I’ve wronged you, because we love each other deeply; I’m selfish enough to believe you’ll always forgive all my faults and shortcomings. And indeed, you always have.

I remember the first night you and I were together, you were so good to me. I told you my father died when I was little, and my mother raised me alone, through great hardship. You went quiet, then said you’d be good to me. After you finished with me, I sucked at your abs, firm like a date cake, and stroked your now-softened penis, which still carried a faint fishy scent. Teasingly, I asked how many women you’d slept with over the years, and whether they too had stained the sheets red for you the way I had. You answered me again with silence. I didn’t push you on it, because that night alone was worth a lifetime of remembering.

Later, one day, you told me you’d discovered you were gay. I wasn’t all that surprised. In the slow-warming affection that had built up between us over a long time, what kind of people you were drawn to, what organs you favored — none of that mattered so much anymore. Or perhaps, after a long period of abstraction and axiomatization, my understanding of you had already risen to a theoretical, conceptual level, so that no matter what your true nature turned out to be once stripped bare, I would love you regardless. Yes — some “bugs” once let into your life don’t leave again once dawn breaks. It’s just that you no longer wound yourself up like clockwork to be with me the way you used to.

Still later, on the day you left Chengdu, you suddenly told me you’d been forced into a blind date, and that it was causing you great pain. I didn’t know what role, what identity, I should speak from — friend, or just someone you knew online? Neither the patrilineal talk of carrying on the family line, nor the matriarchal notion of sheltering and embracing, was enough to express my helplessness. When you said you hated the people in your family, hated their orders, that you would absolutely never find a girlfriend and so on, I honestly couldn’t tell whether that was a young man’s unrestrained fervor, or a young woman’s shy retreat from the world. You really are a boy with a fragile heart hidden under a tough exterior!

These are just some extra words, set down for the sake of certain things that once were. If they seem a little disordered, without much structure, it’s only because these are simply the marginal, fragmentary language that once flickered through my mind at some point in time. I don’t want to say these things directly to you, or to anyone. In that half-asleep, half-awake state, I feel that our relationship has been getting better and better. I can understand the way you love — steeped in longing, refusing to follow convention, insisting on rational thought. You do love me; sometimes you’re my teacher, sometimes my older brother, sometimes my husband, and sometimes you even feel like a wife. I am deeply sunk into this ambiguous, in-between state. It’s really quite wonderful.

Ugh, I’ve said so much because of you, you annoying gay man — I must be out of my mind. Still, it’s left me feeling rather inspired.