What Boys Are Made Of

This essay was featured on Medium on October 4. Click here to read the Medium version, and to put a bit of money in my pocket by doing so. 

Every night this week I've had nightmares and insomnia. Insomnia, eh, I've been sleeping badly for twenty-five years. But constant nightmares is new. Last night I dreamed that I was in a small town and some men catcalled me, so I lured them with promises of sex into a basement where co-conspirators waited to chain them, chop them up, and sell their meat and bones to local butchers. I didn't exactly want this to happen, but I didn't exactly not want it to.

A Meditation on Truth and Columbine

For a few weeks now I've been listening to the audiobook of Sue Klebold's A Mother's Reckoning. Her son was Dylan Klebold, one of the pair of shooters at Columbine High School in April of 1999. The book is an attempt to shed light on Dylan's life, death, and choices.

It is harrowing.

Dylan was born in September of 1981, thirty-two days before I was. When he was a senior at Columbine, I was a senior at my own high school. As I've grown up, and Dylan has remained permanently seventeen, I've continued to prick up my ears at mentions of what he and Eric Harris did that day. I read Dave Cullen's meticulous journalistic study of the shooting, Columbine, twice in a row, some sections over and over. The book provides a useful little chapter that situates psychopathy better than anything else I've ever read, but that isn't the only reason. Columbine brings me vividly back to the experience of being a senior in high school in 1998-99 - what it was like to be that specific age in that specific year. When Cullen writes about American teenagers in 1999, he's talking about my peers. Eric and Dylan are hundreds of miles from where I was, both geographically and emotionally, but I recognize their area code. That experience, reading about these monstrous peers of mine, is frightening, familiar, discomfiting; it's a feeling that's not quite pleasant, but that I can't seem to quit wanting to be inside of.