Marathon

Boston--

1. Minutes after it happened I got a text form a friend in California (also from the Boston area) asking if everyone was alright. I had no idea what had happened, but called my parents immediately. I remember doing this as if I was outside my body, and the weather was nice.
2. I’m from the area. The towns in the newspapers were ones where I had been many times. But I wasn’t there; I was in the same position as everyone else at Bard. My family was safe but otherwise nothing had sunk in, I was eating dinner with Shinno. Fifteen minutes.
3. Before anyone had been identified, my friend in Moscow was trying to figure out what was going on: I don’t know man, I just have conspiracy theories. Boston is a symbol of history, resilience, progress. It’s Tax day. It’s Patriots day. The Marathon is endurance, hard work, family, community, tradition. People on the internet say its Muslim extremists, but whoever did it had to know area well, so it seems unlikely that they are foreign.
4. Knowing people. Those watching the race. Another Bard friend’s mother is a nurse, so she was up there. 
5. Not really giving a damn about motivations, because why should I give them the satisfaction of getting their message across? 
6. I speak Russian. So pretty soon after I found out; Oh, this person I know had leased their first car from the family of (now) terrorist. And another one, who I’ve met, had the father as his auto mechanic. And then by the time I found out about my friend knowing one of them on a more personal level it was just like “of course my Russian stoner friend met another Russian-speaking stoner at the UMass Boston orientation”.
7. And that part made me so proud: so many injuries but somehow the medical system worked so well. Everything was so coordinated and fucking worked.
8. And then someone we know was going to work (from Newton to Watertown, I think). But everything was in lock-down so the police stopped her. “Where are you going” “work” “what work, everything is in lock-down…what accent is that?” “Russian” and then they practically followed her home.
9. The news. How which news sources spun the information or non-information. Miranda rights, terrorism, torture, how many people are killed in Iraq in a day? And everyone suddenly becoming experts on Chechnya. The some paranoid thought in my head of "I'm lucky Russians are Caucasian and Asian, and so we aren't as easily profiled". The photographs of Boston as a ghost town.
10. And now I just got a letter from my friend at MIT “It’s been such an absolutely crazy week…The police officer who died got shot about 100 yards away from East Campus, and we first heard just because someone was passing that way and saw forty police cars. So they got on the radio (a lot of people here have ham radios that can catch police frequencies) and started listening” and how people even the day after where just…living. Life. “and it’s surreal because sometimes you can hear gunshots and they’re bringing in, like, a hostage negotiator and you just realize – this is not a movie”