This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances

by Eric LaRocca

After I turn to close the door, I creep inside—the impossibly large entryway threatening to grow even larger and swallow me whole. It seems so peculiar to me—how the house has not diminished in size, but rather seems so much more colossal than I had remembered. Usually, childhood homes shrink in size when you return to them. At least that’s what I’ve been told. But not this place. For some inexplicable reason, the house seemed to become even bigger in my absence, like some cruel magic trick at my expense.

“I don’t think home exists when you grow up,” I say. “It’s something you lose and forget about. Like an old pair of shoes or baby teeth. Home is—something you outgrow.”

But I knew full well how there was some unnamable urge rooted in every human being that compelled us to drag others into our suffering, our despair.