Nightmares Brought to Life
At noon today I watched a big screen at the law school, saw the Boston Marathon finishers cross the finish line with smiles on their faces.
Two and a half hours later I was sitting in my bedroom in Cambridge, writing a paper, when my brother both texted and gchatted me (generally unprecedented), asking me what I was doing, was I at home, there were two explosions at the finish line I had been watching just minutes prior.
Terrorist attacks (however broadly one wants to define “terrorist”; any human being who could do this is an absolute terrorist in my book) are not new. To someone who has family in Israel, and who pays attention to the tension in the Middle East, they are, in fact, unfortunately commonplace.
But it’s not often that I sit in my ivory tower, this beautiful glass bubble that is my law school, and feel precariously perched next to destruction. Merely two miles away: blood, screams, fleeing, horror. I practically lived on Boylston for a summer. Marathon Monday is a happy holiday in this city. And one person had hell rain down on us, on this, today.
I sat in class just 29 minutes after the explosions, shaking, following a liveblog and seventeen twitter update streams, looking at photos and red spatter and feeling sick to my stomach. Needless to say I did not learn much about the fourteenth amendment today, but rather learned that no place is safe. That we cannot take our existence for granted, even here, what feels like the safest of places.
I received many, many messages from concerned friends and acquaintances ensuring I was safe — “I know you run and stuff” — and what shook me most was that they’re right; I could have been there, if not as participant (as knees preclude), then certainly as spectator, the more dangerous role today. What brightened today, though, was the fact that so many cared. All of us here got messages like that. And everyone I know personally was unharmed.
I spoke to my mother and father about my disturbance. We compared it to Aurora, and Newtown, all of the recent horrors that beg comparison, but the difference here is that the culprit today is a coward; he continues to lurk in the shadows tonight.
Show your face, monster.
But my mother also told me about her time in Tel Aviv, when she had been out on a popular street one night, and not twelve hours later the block was exploded by bombs. This is life. We thank God — or whoever — for our luck in having chosen to be there twelve hours earlier. There is no guilt, or sorrow, in having been spared.
It is eerie. But it is life. And we take each day as it comes, each morning as a singular blessing.
