We fled to someone’s living room in Columbus, Ohio, and sat around the glowing porthole of CNN, peering into New York’s ashy hell. In a somber toast to our new lives in war-time, someone brought out the pot, rolled a joint. I drank my ice water and passed the joint without inhaling, knowing that pot would make me still more anxious and unsettled. Wondering whether another attack or nuclear retaliation were imminent, I numbly wandered into our host’s bathroom.

On a low wire rack piled with bath products beneath the sink, I spotted an amber bottle of prescription-strength allergy medication. I picked up the bottle of Claritin. The ovals nestled densely like a cache of powerful larvae. In a flash of denial and prosaic problem-solving mania, I numbly multitasked, stole, and became overly involved with my boyfriend’s uninsured sinuses. I opened the bottle and fished out one pill with the tip of a moistened finger. I put the pill in my pocket.

On the back porch, women’s palms exuded muffled clacks as cell phones clicked shut like muted castanets. Calls to New York, where husbands and lovers worked and lived, could not be completed as dialed. Our arms twined around our torsos as if to hold in our organs. We chewed on our moisturized cuticles with the edges of our white teeth, and our eyes scanned the still and flawless sky. Someone changed the channel to Matt Lauer and Katie Couric, who sat at a round table strewn with papers and gripped bottles of spring water.

Comfort looked like those plastic bottles of water, like a plastic bottle filled with prescription medication. Comfort to my friends looked like ice cubes glinting in glasses, like the lava-red glowing tip of burning marijuana. Comfort looked like things we could put in our mouths to solve the small problems.

A strictly economist view of restitution might grant me absolution if I were to find that almost-stranger and pay her for one Claritin, which was available only by prescription back in 2001. She probably shelled out a co-pay of $15 for 30 pills, so I might get off easy with a bill of 50 cents. Claritin can now be purchased over the counter for about $1 a pill. Either way, the financial damage I inflicted on this woman was minimal, and I hasten to add that I didn’t even take a hit off her joint, which would have cost more than 50 cents per toke. But wait: the pot was offered freely in a ritual of panic and bonding. Sadly, nobody hands out antihistamines as hors d’oeuvres. So the meaning of my action contains the crime: I took something that wasn’t given in order to give something that wasn’t requested.

I stole the pill for my then-boyfriend D., who sniffled daily, red-eye while holding power tools, working outside in hay fever season. D. had been up on scaffolding under the bright blue sky repairing a chimney when the towers collapsed. The house was in a rough neighborhood; when a crack addict wandered by and screamed, “Man, they’re bombing New York!” D. thought it a crack fantasy and shook his head.

Tap water and a stolen pill in the glare of smoke and ash. How dare I breathe the trivial and the catastrophic together? I reveal this petty crime because I’m interested in its existence. I want to know what it means. How is it possible, in a state of national emergency, to steal an allergy pill? How can I prove to you that it somehow matters?

Without insurance, an allergy pill cost a $60 office visit and another $50 or so for a prescription. A Western convenience; we were awash in material privilege, even if we couldn’t get access to all of it. Sometimes the envy of knowing we were surrounded by the well-insured, by healthcare, made my bones ache.

Living in a state of constant fear—or even low-level anxiety—is physically toxic. I worried about D.’s lack of insurance. I made myself sick worrying about sickness; I envisioned his circular saw slipping, had horribly maiming visions slippery with blood. Then I tried to offer solutions. I researched, ran the numbers, income versus outcome, flip and flip and allocate. I made calls, I ordered pamphlets and price quotes for catastrophic health insurance policies for D. to look at. Obviously, I am to blame for the direction of my thoughts and their results. My worry solved nothing, and was an invasive attempt to protect Ds. body and his health. My worry led me into irrational thinking.

I structured his existence in my image, like a fantasy in which democracy can be spread from nation to nation around the world, with a little aggressive intervention to get the ball rolling. I might claim that my intervention was motivated by love and humanitarian concern. But I could not have been more selfish. D. suffered loudly, and because I could not admit it was annoying, I tried to solve it for him so he would be quiet and act the way I wanted him to act.

In the midst of my pharmaceutical theft, I was not thinking about a full-scale cure. You might argue that in presenting my boyfriend with one stolen pill, I was actually increasing his suffering by giving him a taste of temporary relief. What was I thinking?

Although I did not articulate it to myself at the moment, one pill represented a kind of bait. I almost believed that if D. swallowed the solitary Claritin, he would be roused from the hazy, sleepy toleration of his iron-fisted, dictatorial allergies. He would remember what it felt like to have a clear head and nose. Then, I reasoned, with a “taste of freedom,” he would feel within him the stirrings of motivation and take steps on his own behalf—steps I’d conveniently laid out ahead of time. I planned to take quick and firm action, presenting my pill of freedom to pepper the totalitarian regime of mucous with high-powered weapons. The vision: After a quick surgical strike to shrink the membranes of terror, a motivated and awakened D. would take up the reins of power and start to make his own to-do lists in order to realize his destiny.

Some people cook when they feel adrift, and some clean, just to see the results of their labor. I don’t always steal for comfort. I am either an honest person who has moral lapses or a thief who practices infrequently.

Children steal because they want to even the equation; they often can’t imagine that one day in the natural course of time, they will grow into power. When I was small, I stole penny candy and plastic grapes from fruit arrangements in the upstairs arts-and-crafts section of Bruns’ Drugstore. I squeezed the plastic purple and green bulbs and held the open hole, once filled by the missing plastic stem, against my skin. When I let go, suction adhered the bulb tightly to my arm or forehead like a boil or a massive wart. The small objects of my theft represented my secret will. They held mysterious significance and I wanted them in order to see myself.

Could I or should I have trusted, like a child, that one day we would grow into insurance and stability? At the time, it seemed foolish to bank on hope with so much evidence to the contrary.

As I got older, the infrequent targets of my theft became more symbolic. I took an expensive name-brand shirt from a friend during a sleepover because I lusted not so much for the shirt (unattractive, of the Coca-Cola brand strangely popular in the Midwest in the late ‘80s) as for the elusive status it seemed to promise. I mailed the shirt back to her later with a gift and an apology, but the damage was done and she never replied. In my twenties, I was an infrequent shoplifter, hitting the jewelry racks at the Dollar Store and Urban Outfitters when my life seemed particularly bleak and unadorned.

I applied to well-paying corporate jobs and found myself unworthy and unqualified. I worried that maybe I’d never been middle-class enough, or maybe I had squandered my chance. As a temporary receptionist, I wore a sack-like black skirt I bought for a dollar from Goodwill. I did not mind Goodwill or even taking things from the trash and the curb when they appealed and fit me; that was fun. But most of the small thefts were things I did not desperately need; my low income created a general fog of lack that made anything with a price tag into a promise of forbidden comfort.

I stole markers from my job at the photo processing store. I stole soap and shampoo from the youth home where I was a counselor. I stole stacks of Post-it Notes from office jobs, pens from doctors’ offices, and a vinyl drink coaster from an expansive conference room table at a pointless job interview. I liberated things from The Man. Or else maybe I wanted to be The Man. I resented people who had disposable income. I wanted pretty things, and the world owed me these treats, which it dangled just beyond the clear barriers of department store windows.

If you frame something as a crisis waiting to happen, warning signs of a crisis abound. A sortie for reconnaissance often strangely leads to larger interventions, and when one begins to focus on a problem as a problem, it tends to escalate and provide evidence for further involvement and more complex solutions.

I lusted after safety, but I also hated those who had what I wanted, and I hated those who had structured life to be so hard. I can’t tell now which of these two emotions was stronger, and even though I am safe today, I can close my eyes and feel a stripe of orange anger down the center of my belly, a nauseating desire for revenge.

Terrorism is defined by drastic, sudden, and violent action, yet its corollary—long term fear and anxiety, waiting for the next attack—is a side-effect also desired by the terrorists. If the threat of future violence effectively leeches from a population its sense of the future, its sense of agency and security, the terrorist has won the war with a single battle.

One of the sad things about terrorism from a rhetorical perspective is that the terrorist often attempts to communicate or draw attention to the plight of a victimized group with an act of violence. The act of violence, however, overshadows any attention to the meaning for the terrorist. In effect, the terrorist’s choice of medium destroys the message.

What is the message, what is the meaning, of living for years with that anxiety? An annual physical might reveal a chronic condition, the treatment of which could lead to bankruptcy. Half of the personal bankruptcies today are triggered in some way by medical debt. “Fair” in this context is drained of meaning. Life isn’t fair, kids. What it is supposed to teach us? Maybe it’s some hard-edged version of the American dream, some motivation to collect enough money to buy healing. But life inside a tunnel makes you frantic; any lunge toward the light can look like a solution.

The glowing maps on the television began to envision the scenarios, to make feverish plans. We ate doom for breakfast and nursed revenge. Blowback is the military term for unintended consequences of foreign intervention. The United States funded Islamic fundamentalist Afghanis in the 1980s in a cold-war fight against a Soviet invasion of the country. More than $600 million a year through a decade provided a launch pad for the growth of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. It takes willful effort to not connect the dots. Yet in the aftermath of 9/11, asking for reasons and meaning was akin to treason. If you wondered about the connections, you were telling widows their husbands deserved to die.

I wonder what resentment and rage we nurse here, what blowback will taste like. I know it, because I have felt it in myself. I know it is offensive to talk about health insurance and terrorism in the same breath. It is offensive to bring together two opposite systems; one is the American way and business as usual. The other is the negation of everything that country stands for. And yet both can kill you. The threat of death, the wanton harm of bodies, is the only common thread.

Insanity is fixating on any loose ends of healthcare and stealing whatever I could get my hands on. Health insurance became the beloved, the obsession. Every symbolic move toward healthcare was equated for me with a move toward safety. I was not in danger of immediate death, but every potential condition felt like a threat. I am not saying “insane” as if I am or was in the minority: Denial of symptoms, denial of disease, denial of rampant problems and festering wounds. I comforted myself with fantasies of control. I denied what was going on in my own body to focus on someone else’s problems.

I swallowed a little red pill with my coffee, an over-the-counter Sudafed. I bought a box of decongestants every time I went grocery shopping. I always had extra pills rolling around in the corners of my purse. They looked like little red-hot candies. I always had a stuffy nose, but Sudafed was cheap.

Then I started grad school and got student health insurance. I visited a doctor at the campus health center and described the symptoms of obvious seasonal allergies: the runny nose, scratchy throat and ears, buzzing head. The doctor sat diagonally to my right behind a desk. He nodded, stroked his chin and flipped through my chart. “Hmmm,” he said. “I don’t see any history of allergies in your chart.”

Correct. I’ve never received treatment for allergies. Because I’m lying, I might have said to the doctor, because this is not for me. Because life is not going the way I’d planned, because things feel gray-yellow, the color of a science laboratory’s walls. Because the game is not going in my favor and so I’m going to cheat.

I held my purposeful little grad student shoulder bag, filled with pens and appointments and shopping lists. I sat in the sunlight streaming in the window and held out my prescription, which meant one thing: a vial of pills I could take home to D. I stepped down the stairs slowly to contain my joy. I was in like an undetected thief. I paid—a song, a nothing—and stuffed the amber bottle triple-wrapped in its white paper baggie and assorted warning labels and receipts into my tote bag, flooded with a sense of relief, wealth, and well-being. I wanted to dash home and hand the vial to D. like a prize. I possessed the ability to change and master the symptoms of illness, the illusion or reality of helping to heal.

And here is the truth another way: I stole that first Claritin from bitterness, and lied to get the bottle from joy. I stole the first because it was an easy mark, not because it would actually improve my life, our lives, in any significant way. That first theft was motivated by spite, as if I’d run a car key along the shiny surface of a Mercedes out of sheer bitterness, because it represented the other life I wanted for myself and my boyfriend, the life in which we were both insured and enfolded in that sense of physical, bodily security I craved. I took it because I was angry he didn’t seem to want that life. I was frustrated and impatient and almost rageful at the world for failing to conform to my image of how things should be. I took it because I was afraid we would never get there. I took it because I was angry it was so tempting, because I felt too old to be scrounging for pills.

The whole bottle: that was joy, a victimless crime. Faking a prescription is a crime that carries a sentence of up to a $5,000 fine and five years in jail. Most people create fake prescriptions to feed their addictions to controlled substances. People who fake ailments to get narcotics are addicts who need help, or they are criminals taking advantage of other people’s addictions. I was high on my own thrifty resourcefulness, my ability to take care of a problem with the dormant power of my student health insurance card. I wanted to help D., but more than anything else I wanted the worry to stop, so much so that I was willing to easily slide from misdemeanor to felony.

Two years later, lots of death on the news, and I was safely insured. Selfish, aren’t I? Mentioning death and life in the same sentence is treason, and yet I have a point.

An otolaryngologist looked up my nose and told me my sinuses were permanently inflamed. He winced and told me I had a severely deviated septum, probably the result of either a birth defect or a sharp blow to the face when I was young, leaving internal structures all awry. “I think we’re going to have to do a little surgery,” he said.

My face lit up. “Great,” I said. “If it will help, I’m all for it.” Put me under, cut away.

He pulled his lighted scope away from his eye and laughed. “I’ve rarely had a patient so calm about getting an operation,” he said.

You don’t understand, I wanted to tell him. Cut my face, use your skill, and I rejoice. The essence of fear is uncertainty. Knowing, faith, choosing action and certainty—these options lock in on a solution, illusory or real, that shows the route to sanguine bliss.