Eric LaRocca

After all, what exactly is a family, if not a brotherhood and sisterhood afflicted with the same terminal disease?

At the end of each day, he used to ask me, “what have you done today to deserve your eyes?”

I’d sooner swallow wet concrete than let him call me his or dare to call him mine.

I haven’t thought of him much since it first happened—since the night when I first pulled his teeth, plucked his fingernails, and organized them accordingly; as if they were broken remnants, artifacts in the museum of our love: a gallery of yellowing antiquity.

There were many things I imagined doing to him: cracking him open as if he were some expensive delicacy imported from a faraway land and gorging on his entrails until my stomach was fit to burst.

After all, what exactly is a family, if not a brotherhood and sisterhood afflicted with the same terminal disease?

After all, what exactly is a family, if not a brotherhood and sisterhood afflicted with the same terminal disease?

“What have you done today to deserve your eyes?”

11:10:01 It took me years to understand what he actually meant

11:10:08 Our eyesight—among other things—is a gift that we take for granted

I think all of us feel empty most of the time and we merely pretend to fill the vacuum with laughter, crying, apologies—anything to make us feel human.

There’s a reason objects burn up when they fall to earth like gruesome angels—a reason other than the obvious one. Asteroids the size of armored cars narrow to mere pebbles in a matter of seconds. It’s because the planet is a carnivore and just wants to be fed. People want that as well. People like to eat other people.
I spent so many years forgetting I had teeth, too.