At Dark, I Become Loathsome

by Eric LaRocca

I think people should remain protected when nighttime approaches, almost as if twilight were a cancer that could rot us away until we were threadbare, tattered, and broken things, never to be repaired again.

At night, I become guilty of crimes I haven’t committed, much less even contemplated. I become a caricature of my former self—a creature to be persecuted, loathed, reviled, detested. At nighttime, I’m something to be tortured until condemned—someone completely and forever misunderstood.

But though humanity doesn’t escape us when it’s dark out, I’ve learned that human decency only exists when it’s convenient.

I can’t help but wonder if she thinks I want to fuck her. I don’t.

Still, there’s a part of me that wonders how I might feel if I turned everyone and everything away until I was completely alone with my thoughts as my only companions.

What’s the point of carrying on when I know it’s futile? There’s nothing for me here. Perhaps there once was. But not anymore.

That’s when the little girl finally answered. “Heaven is a dark room,” she said. “There’s nothing for us there.”

I feel as though I exist in some awful state of purgatory, trapped between both sexes.

What I once thought might bring me a modicum of comfort and release has now polluted me, making me nothing more than unusable goods.

The world is nothing more than a carnivorous plant that devours the things that are the softest and most delicate.

You see, when we begin our lives in this world, we begin as creators. We are constantly building. Our lives are spent creating, inventing, designing. I always knew I was building something, starting when I was very little. I only wish I had known it was a grave. My grave.”

Christianity has made sycophants of most of us—lobotomized zombies who will suckle at any available teat even if it’s leaking lighter fluid and we’re holding a torch.

What’s the point of pretending that we’re being carried through the universe by the giant hand of some caring, compassionate deity? We’re not, and there is no point.

There’s something decidedly divine about wallowing in the depths of despair, in the throes of melancholy—it’s holy, sacred. Death is the final act and cannot be undone. Despair and misery, however, can ferry you to the most consecrated of places within the confines of your mind.

“Children lose their innocence when they realize that adults can hurt them,”