And all the ceilings in New York have come down.

"Boredom is the root of all evil."
[S. Kierkegaard]



I had my first kiss on September 11th, five years ago today. I remember this now, of course, because it is ominous -- this boy would later sleep with sex workers at age fourteen or fifteen, sleep with my closest friend at the time. He would attempt suicide with broken beer bottles to the wrist -- because I didn't return his phone calls. By seeing him as often as I did, I would come to witness a drug war waged with frames of doors ripped off their walls, with rusty nails and gasoline fires. In the depths of rage after an argument which itself would have directly followed a passionate kiss, he punched me in the face until I was bleeding. He once attempted to run me over with his car.

People ask all the time -- why didn't U.S. intelligence intervene in what they knew looked suspicious until it was too late? What should be a simpler question -- why did I keep seeing this boy? I thought I loved him -- what I loved was being ignorant to the fact that some human actions are absolutely intolerable. If I always tolerated him, then he became the limit to my moral world and to my freedom. We would be rendered free of judgment by any greater society. I wanted to live in a world where everything was forgivable, even unrepentant violence -- for in such a world, how could my relatively naive and gentle nature not appear saintly?

When what we want does not fall neatly into our hands, insidiously, we imagine fate edging us along. Rather than admit the necessary fact that we lack, we craft false respite from our striving with illogicality, with superstitions. This abusive relationship I was in could never truly be forged in commitment or freedom; and so we would ask fate to forge it for us. By September 11, 2002, we had broken up, but we remembered our anniversary -- not because it was ominous, but as the first of an indefinite and increasing number of reconciliations. The reconciliations happened just as the worst Hollywood film would have done them. These were the ethics of adolescence, truly, but we were and are living in a cultural atmosphere where immaturity is constantly being mistaken for vitality.

We went to dinner at a restaurant we could walk to from our high school -- he paid for everything, of course. A year after our first embrace, we spoke plainly. He let me know that he "wanted me back." We knew that we could not help but fall back into one another's arms, and so we did, our depravity teetering obscenely between hypocrisy and idealism. And I know that even now, I still want to accord these passions some dignity. Whether I want this out of a desire to redeem our ignorance, or because a part of me still wants to live in that wonderland of universal validities, amoral and boundless -- that is harder to discern.

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