When I was young enough to wear overalls unashamedly I tried to steal a pair of barrettes from Gymboree, the children’s clothing store. I stood under the electric white of the fluorescent lights and quietly slipped the pair into my pocket. As I waited there, adrenaline shooting through my mind, I imagined becoming a professional thief and detailed a regimen in which I would steal progressively larger items to hone my skills. I would become the best thief, a thief’s thief, a world renowned sleight of hand pick pocket, slipping in and out of well guarded museums and stores with impossibly large treasures. I don’t remember how I was caught or who it was that caught me. What I do remember is my intestines being twisted into a tourniquet. I had never felt so afraid, anxious, idiotic and ashamed in my life. Tangled up in fantasy, I had wandered into doing something awful and absurd. Thou shalt not steal. Even then I did not believe in God, but I understood that the 8th commandment was the stuff societies were built on; it was a rooted in our very deepest, ancient sense of fairness. Even worse, I had not succeeded. I was not even competent enough to steal a small pair of barrettes. My mother, who had been raised and at heart will always be a Catholic, was furious and threatened to make me write a letter of apology to the store manager explaining why I had decided to steal. At that point, I no longer knew. I didn’t even wear barrettes. What I did know was that I was a terrible, stupid, fundamentally indecent human being and would be for the rest of my life.
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