Eric LaRocca
February 15, 2021
If you want to truly and unmistakeably unravel a person – hurt them and then let them live.
February 16, 2021
If your soul were a pitchfork, I’d despise you.
Not because I truly detested you or because I wished you unwell. Quite the contrary. I’d loathe you entirely because it would be that much more difficult to finally possess you, to fully and utterly bewitch you and make you mine. Of course, I’d happily pluck the shiny bits of gore from the weapon’s teeth and save them to be artefacts warehoused in the museum of our love. But I’m delighted to know that your spirit is uncaged and eager to be possessed by the first presence willing to charm it.
There are times when I think of you and wonder if you truly understand me and what I desire to be. It’s difficult to even consider how the two of us might exchange words with one another, how you might receive me once you’ve issued an invitation to the dance.
I’ve already told you that the love you seek is unnatural, that it’s abhorrent. The idea of two men coupling – it’s repugnant in every aspect of the word.
But your soul is free to be possessed. The fact of the matter is that everything in this world wants to hurt you. It’s unequivocal and unmistakeable in the way that the world seems to delight in the destruction of small, delicate things. It takes pleasure in torturing you.
Perhaps your soul should have been a pitchfork. Perhaps then you might have had a fighting chance to be free.
But you don’t.
That’s why you so completely and so wholly belong to me.
It’s a bit unfair when you think about it, isn’t it? I’ll always be able to hurt you more than you could ever dream of harming me. If only your soul were a pitchfork…
February 17, 2021
I don’t know whether I’ll plan to write in this diary every day or not. It seems like a shame to waste such a handsome notebook. My mother bought it for me at a local shop for my twenty-first birthday a few years ago and I only just rediscovered it when I went to New Hampshire to visit her for the weekend.
I’m glad I found it.
There’s an unearned familiarity you seem to associate with any item you recognise after something terrible has happened to you.
I never used to pay much attention to the row of neatly polished teapots my mother keeps above the dining room fireplace. Now, for some reason, I count each of them when I enter the room and touch each of their handles as if I were introducing myself to them for the first time.
“I’m still alive. I’m still here,” I tell each of the teapots, as if fearing they were somehow concerned, as if they somehow knew what had happened to me and how I had been completely and utterly changed since the last time I had visited.
I’m not ready to write about what happened yet. But, for the sake of clarity, in case anybody ends up reading this, I’ll refer to what happened as ‘the birthday’.
I’m not referring to the horrible event as a birthday because I consider that the day when I was born for the second time. Nothing as dramatic or as impossibly pretentious as that. I’m referring to it as ‘the birthday’ simply because I prefer to view the event as a living thing – as if it had skin as shiny as an alligator’s and teeth like a grinning chimpanzee and the antlers of a young buck. I refuse to think of it as a day when I was changed, but rather as a day when the whole world around me changed – a day when a new kind of creature was brought into existence. Something that I helped to create.
I wonder if I think of it like that because I’m queer and I’ve been taught for most of my life that I’ll never have children of my own despite the fact that I have a loving and devoted partner. Of course, we can adopt. We can try to apply for a surrogate as well. But it goes without saying that the two of us can never conceive and procreate the same way that a man and woman can. I think that’s the most inequitable aspect of being a faggot – the simple fact that a child seems so impossible, so unlikely.
I’m not sure I would even want one now. Not after what happened. Not after knowing what some people are truly capable of.
February 18, 2021
“If your soul were a pitchfork, I’d despise you.”
I think I’ve perhaps misheard them. They speak so softly that I can scarcely understand what they’re saying, especially late at night when I’m drowsy and ready for sleep.
“What soul?” I ask. “Mine?”
“This body has been used many times,” they tell me. “You’d do well to honour it better.”
I search every corner of my bedroom – the dark where the walls meet – and I don’t see anything. The voices seem to arrive suddenly in my mind as if they were already gently swirling there, as if they had already been planted deep inside me by invisible hands so loving and so tender.
“I can’t honour what’s been hurt,” I tell them. “He took most of me with him when he left. There’s more of me on the outside than there is left on the inside.”
The voices hiss at me, and I nearly retch at the unbearable sound of their shrill, metallic murmurs whirling in the space between my ears.
“He left us in your care because he knew you could handle it,” the voices say. “You’d be wise to respect the honour.”
I nearly laugh at them, but I control myself as much as I possibly can.
“Should I respect what he did to me?” I ask them. “Am I supposed to be grateful for how he let me live?”
My head throbs, the voices churning inside my mind like melted butter in a pot.
“We were always supposed to find you,” they tell me. “This skin once belonged to us. We’re overjoyed to find it again.”
I sense my stomach curling at the thought of them staying, of them taking up residence inside me, of them claiming me the same way he had once claimed me and smeared himself upon me.
“There’s nothing I can do to change your minds?” I ask them.
“Why would we leave you?” they ask me. “We were always supposed to find you. Your body is our home.”
It feels unusual to hear them say this – to know that I’m considered ‘home’ to someone, something else, when I’ve struggled to call any place ‘home’ since I was a child.
I think there’s something that happens when you grow up and move out of your parents’ house – you feel as if you don’t belong anywhere. It’s a fine art – to create a place you can call ‘home’. Even though I love Yusuf with all my heart, there’s a part of me that wonders if I’ll ever be truly content with him. There’s a part of me that wonders if I’ll be brave enough to consider him my ‘home’.
It’s a strange feeling to know that there are things living inside me that have known me before, that consider my body their home – their sanctuary, their refuge.
Who am I to deprive them of that comfort?
February 19, 2021
I woke up this morning and discovered that my teeth had turned black, something dark oozing from my gums as shiny and as black as motor oil.
“Something’s wrong,” I told Yusuf, spitting broken bits of teeth like tiny black buttons. “There’s something inside my mouth.”
I called my dentist and begged him to schedule an appointment for me as soon as he could. Yusuf wanted to take me to the emergency room. Naturally, I thought about it. But hospitals have always scared me. Not to mention, I’m forever convinced that once I enter a hospital, I’ll never come back out. That’s what had happened to my grandfather, after all. He went to the ER for a minor heart palpitation and then two days later he was pronounced dead.
I went to my dentist and the most peculiar thing happened. He didn’t seem alarmed by the sight of my teeth. He didn’t shy away or flinch in revulsion as I had expected him to. In fact, he seemed to acknowledge the decaying teeth with a look of matter-of-factness that all dentists seem to possess when they’re confronted with the ordinary or, even worse, the inevitable.
“You don’t think there’s anything to be worried about?” I asked him, my mouth stuffed with bits of gauze to reduce some of the swelling.
He glanced at his masked assistant, rolling his eyes. “Surely you could have expressed concern while it was happening.”
I sensed my face scrunching at him, confused. “I was sleeping when it happened. I woke up and I found them like this.”
“You don’t expect me to believe that,” he said. “There’s no possible way you were sleeping while it was happening.”
I could hardly understand him. “While what was happening?”
It was then I began to wonder, my mind racing. Does he know? Does he know what happened to me? How could he have possibly found out?
Then it dawned on me. When something horrible happens to you, other monsters are acutely aware that you’ve been marked, that you’re an easy target. Perhaps that’s what I was to him. After all, I had heard some rumours that he preferred the company of younger men. But I had never seen him on any of the apps. Still, it made me wonder if he knew because he was capable of doing the same unspeakable thing to me. Perhaps he wanted to.
More than anything, I knew I had to leave.
I went home, my mouth swollen with gauze, and fell on the couch where I cried for hours until Yusuf finally came home.
He held me in his arms, and we pretended that we were two small birds roosting in the rafters of an old barn – mated for life, our hearts tethered by a thin netting of chicken wire and softly beating together as one.
February 20, 2021
There’s a small boy named Ezekiel who lives inside me and tells me that I’m unnatural – that I’m repugnant, that I’m a vile, obscene thing undeserving of comfort or grace.
I’ve decided to let him write this diary entry:
One of the main problems with sex between two men is the horrendous smell. There’s nothing forgiving about male body odour. But when it comes to the male sex organ being generously oiled and shoved inside another’s ass, you must admit that the actual act is grossly abnormal – an abomination of the very integrity of nature, a manmade perversion of cosmic proportions.
Two men cannot truly love one another the same way that a man and a woman can fall in love. This is not only evident in the fact that most gay couples are non-monogamous, but it is also clear in the fact that procreation is not possible between the same sexes. Of course, some might argue that this is a trite and overused example of why homosexual couples should not retain the same rights as heterosexual couples; however, to discredit such a fact is to corrode the very integrity of a union between man and wife.
Circling back to the obviously offensive smell of anal sex between two cisgender men, one must acknowledge the simple fact that sex has been and always must be a pure act. The mere thought of two male bodies coupling in such an aberrant and objectionable way – it’s enough to deter anyone mentally fragile enough from considering such a destructive and repugnant lifestyle.
The fact of the matter is that only those who are weak of mind and spirit are easy to influence into becoming a faggot. It gives me no pleasure to write this, to tell you that you are destined for the pit of eternal suffering if you continue subscribing to this harmful lifestyle.
Ezekiel’s finished writing now. It’s me again. Oscar.
He doesn’t always mean the things he says. It’s just that he cares so much about me and doesn’t want to see me hurt by anyone or anything. Even though sometimes I often wonder if he’d hurt me if he had the chance.
February 21, 2021
It’s been a few days since it happened – ‘the birthday’ – and I think I’m finally ready to write about it. I’ve torn out several pages from this journal, trying to decide where to begin – wondering how to efficiently tell you how everything began without draining myself entirely, and completely undoing my resolve to follow through with the story.
He came over to our apartment late one night after we had texted for most of the day. I had told him that Yusuf was working late and that he wouldn’t be home until after midnight. He asked if he could stop by because there was something he needed to tell me. I knew what that meant. There wasn’t anything he wanted to tell me. What could he have possibly wanted to tell me? It was a ruse – an excuse for him to come over and take exactly what he wanted from me.
He arrived and wore a dark, baggy sweatshirt that stretched down to his knees. I’ll never forget how he smelled – how he reeked of cheap cologne barely disguising the stench of a recently finished cigarette. As soon as I pried open the door, he threw himself at me and forced his tongue down my throat. I didn’t wince or shrink away when he did this. I had asked him to kiss me when he first arrived. I had wanted him to do it.
He asked me where the bedroom was, and I showed him the way. It wasn’t long before our clothes were torn off and I was on my knees, my head bobbing at his groin like the obedient bitch he wanted me to be.
This is what you wanted, I kept reminding myself. This is what you asked for.
I didn’t ask for him to pin me against the wall, to shove two oiled fingers inside me so that I would open up for him. I certainly never asked him to shove himself inside me again and again, his fists pummelling my head because I was squirming too much or because I was begging him to let me go. I might have asked for that once. I might have once dreamed of an encounter when he and I were together and bound in a permanent embrace.
This is what you wanted, I repeated over and over inside my mind.
Finally, he emptied himself in me, slime dripping from between my cheeks. However, it felt different than whenever I was with Yusuf. It somehow felt as though he had drained himself entirely of all his insecurities, his fears, his reservations, and had sent them pulsing through me and filling each and every empty corner inside my body the same way a flood will plug shallow pockets of marshland. That’s what my body was now – a swamp, a fetid place where all useless things might collect and eventually yellow with antiquity.
After he wiped himself clean, he dressed. I walked him to the door and kissed him goodbye. Then, once he was gone, I climbed into the shower and twisted the faucet until the water was scalding hot. I scrubbed myself until I wondered if I might strip the skin from my bone.
And that’s when I heard it – the very first time I heard them utter those words to me, those terrible, spirit-splitting words that seemed to bud from deep within me:
“If your soul were a pitchfork, I’d despise you. Thankfully, it’s not. So, I’m free to hurt you.”
February 22, 2021
I once almost drowned when I was a boy.
I should have died that day.
I was visiting my grandparents in upstate New York when I was eleven or twelve. They had rented a small cabin on the shore of a lake, and we often spent the hot afternoons reclining in the shade of a nearby grove of trees or swimming in the shallow water near the docks where my grandfather kept his boat.
I’ll never forget how one afternoon when I decided to venture out into the deeper water, something caught my foot. It felt slimy like the tail of an eel. Just as I began to reach underwater to see what had grabbed me, something pulled me under and kept me there for what felt like hours. I resisted as much as I could, my vision beginning to blur as soon as I opened my eyes. I tried to swim toward the surface, but something pulled me down deeper and deeper until it felt as though my feet were touching the very bottom of the lake.
I floated there for a moment, and it suddenly felt like something had slipped inside me, a slime-covered rope as thin as a telephone cord coiling inside my belly button and creating pressure there until I could hardly bear it any longer.
Finally, the invisible concrete brick that had been weighing me down suddenly seemed to be removed from my shoulders. I could move again. I was free. I shot up from the depths of the lake and eventually arrived at the surface – gasping, choking for breath.
My grandparents found me when I finally had the strength to swim to shore, dragging myself out of the water and heaving myself onto the sand. It felt peculiar – having survived the ordeal, I mean. I felt as though I were a different person, as though something had happened to me at the bottom of the lake and I had been replaced by someone, something else.
“There’s something different about Oscar,” I would hear my grandparents say about me, whispering to one another in the kitchen as they cleaned dishes. “I wonder if his mother will say anything to us.”
Of course, there was something different about me. Eleven or twelve is the exact age when a young boy starts to realise that he fancies the camaraderie of other boys, that he would much prefer a sexual partner with the same equipment and appetite as him.
Yes, there was something different about me. It had happened in that brief, wondrous moment at the bottom of the lake near my grandparents’ cabin. I had finally realised who I was, and I was completely and utterly unafraid of what I was to become.
We all become possessed by our sexual desires – our urges, our yearnings – eventually. After waiting for most of my life, it had finally happened to me.
February 23, 2021
Don’t ask me why I did it, but today I typed in the search bar on my work laptop: ‘Big Black Cock Fucks Tight Virgin Ass.’
I didn’t realise I was doing it until it finally happened, until I watched the results leach across the page and fill the entire frame of the computer monitor with various images of young men and their freshly bleached assholes being teased by massive specimens of manhood.
It felt as though something else had forced me to type those words into the search bar, as if my mind had been temporarily disconnected while something else took control.
I don’t expect you to believe me. They didn’t believe me at work and asked me to return my laptop as soon as possible, considering the fact I would no longer be employed there.
It’s strange. I’ve thought about searching for pornography on my work laptop many times before. But I’ve never acted on it. I’ve never contemplated the possibility of actually going through with it.
Today, that changed forever.
I told Yusuf what I had done, and he could hardly believe me.
I told him how sorry I was, and he seemed to feel bad for me. He promised that he’ll pick up extra shifts on the weekend until I get a new job so that we can get by with paying the rent.
He also promised me that we’ll be okay.
But I don’t know if I truly believe him.
February 24, 2021
This morning I woke up and discovered I had sprouted a pair of antlers as intricately ornate and as fine-looking as an Ancient Egyptian headdress.
I touched them and I winced a little. They hurt for some reason. My skin around the area – tender and blistered bright red.
“What are they?” Yusuf asked me – far too cautious to touch them, too afraid of what they might be and if they might somehow be infectious.
“I don’t know,” I told him, gazing at myself in the mirror and wondering the same thing.
“But why are they suddenly here?”
“Because I survived,” I told him, my voice breaking apart and disintegrating as if it were wet straw. “Because my soul isn’t a pitchfork.”
February 25, 2021
I’ve finally come to the horrible realisation that this was always supposed to happen to me. He was always supposed to hurt me and completely undo me until I was a totally different person – a person that enjoys being possessed, being controlled and manipulated by others.
I was so easy to possess, after all. I made it so comfortable for them to slip inside me, for them to take ownership of my body, my integrity, my sexuality. Yes, my sexuality. That’s the reason this happened in the first place. This would have never happened if I had preferred women instead, if I had suppressed these terrible urges, these feelings, as my father once begged me to.
But I’m a faggot.
To be a faggot is to relinquish control of your body and to allow others to desecrate it.
Perhaps Ezekiel is right. Perhaps the others are right as well.
This is a truly monstrous lifestyle.
February 26, 2021
This morning, I told Yusuf that I did not love him.
It’s not that I stopped loving him, but rather that I was never completely in love with him in the first place. He always loved me more than I cared for him, and I think a small, quiet part of him always knew this to be true. I think he recognised this fact and came to terms with it a while ago but never wanted to actually address it in case I might have a change of heart.
He stared at me for the longest time, his mouth opening and closing with muted words.
“Is it because of what happened?” he asked me, his voice brittle-thin and trembling.
“It’s because everything’s changed for me now,” I told him. “It was always supposed to be like this.”
February 27, 2021
Yusuf decided to pack some of his things and spend some time at his mother’s house over the weekend. I don’t have much else to write today.
February 28, 2021
Rape is a living thing.
It has eyes and ears and a nose and a mouth.
What they don’t tell you about rape or any kind of sexual assault in general is that it can create something in the aftermath of its existence.
It flowers deep inside both people – both the transgressor and the victim – and spreads roots there as if it were a rare tropical plant.
Rape is a living thing.
March 1, 2021
Yusuf returned home today and locked me in the bedroom. He sealed the windows shut and now passes a tray of food underneath the door when I tell him that the voices inside my head are hungry.
“What’s your name?” he asks me.
I can hear his voice quivering – as if he already knows the dreadful answer, as if he were already certain that I was quite and irreparably gone.
“What’s your name?” he asks again when I won’t answer.
“Ezekiel,” I tell him, more bits of broken teeth dripping from between my lips like carpenter ants. “Please let me out.”
“Why won’t you leave us?” he asks me, his voice strained as if pleading.
I laugh, another set of voices hardening in the pit of my throat. “If your soul were a pitchfork, I’d despise you. Thankfully, it’s not.”
I can tell for certain that Yusuf wants to hurt me. He’d bash me over the head with a crowbar or he’d shove a screwdriver inside my ear if he could. But he won’t. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.
He wants this to hurt me as much as possible.
He’s going to let me live.
“We’re going to sharpen your spirit today, Ezekiel,” Yusuf says, the fear and uncertainty in his voice nearly hollowing me out like a spade shovelling a weed-filled flowerbed. “Now. Let’s begin.”