I don't know what to say.

The starting line in Hopkinton, MA(4/15/2013)

I'm sitting in my room in Tower Court. I can hear the Macklemore concert in the background but I couldn't bring myself to go and watch the show. Why? Because something terrible has happened in the city of Boston today.

Today, our hearts broke when we heard the news of what happened. Today, I watched the city of Boston burn, I watched people flee in terror and I saw blood splatter the sidewalks that  I've walked many times before.


My time in Hopkinton isn't something that has come up a lot(if at all on this blog or at my time here at Wellesley). It simply wasn't relevant until now. But I'd like to share a few things about my fair little hometown.

Hopkinton, MA is the starting line of the Boston Marathon. It is a sleepy little town that people only hear about regularly because of the marathon. It's one of the few events that the entire town can really get behind wholeheartedly as a community. Hillers(as Hopkinton-dwellers are called) will no doubt remember that the marathon is kind of integral to our identity. Today, I think every single member of my HHS class(that I'm still facebook friends with anyways) had an extremely visceral reaction to the events because I think we all have really fond memories of the marathon. I saw status updates from people in California, Delaware, Michigan...basically everywhere. It was like everyone who had lived in Hopkinton for most of their lives(like yours truly), just had this immediate, knee-jerky, gut wrenching reaction to the news-no matter where you were, no matter how long ago you left the town. It was just so gosh darn personal. Who doesn't remember all the Kenyan runners coming to visit the schools, running through the dry ice, just so that we could talk to them as 2nd and 3rd graders? Or that different clubs would wake up at the crack of dawn to fundraise by selling Krispy Kremes on the lawn in front of the gazebo on the Town Common/Center School? Quite frankly, I don't think that any town cared as much about the Marathon as we did; it's just a fact. It was a much bigger part of our culture than it was in other towns and I loved that. The Marathon represented a lot of things for us, I think. April vacation, the beginning of Spring or what have you, I think we can all agree that it was a pretty hopeful time of year.

I will never get this image out of my head.

But today, someone put all of that in jeopardy. The footage was rolling endlessly on all of the news stations and everytime I saw it, I felt like someone had stabbed me in the gut. I think regardless of personality, people who live in and around Boston love the city irrevocably and with complete abandon. Nobody ever thinks that something like this will happen to their hometown but I think that I can speak for all of us when I say that watching the city burn was one of the most terrifying experiences I've ever had and I was only watching it on TV, recognizing streets that I walked down before. Watching it made me absolutely sick to my stomach that something like that would happen. It didn't seem real and for the first while after the news came in, I didn't believe it. When the said the president had been briefed that this may be a terrorist act, I wondered "Why? This can't be real, it couldn't possibly have been real." I have lived in Boston my entire life and this has never happened and frankly, I never thought it could. I can not imagine what it would have been like to be there; I assume it was jarring beyond compare.

A few of my best friends were there at the finish line today and I am so thankful that they are safe and sound. I can't help but thinking that not everyone was so fortunate. What happened today was truly awful. And I know that someone who reads this will no doubt say "well this type of thing happens everyday in some places" to which I respond "But not Boston. Never Boston." It's supposed to be some kind of safe haven; I mean, I guess we annoy people by being awesome at sports but we've never really done anything malicious that should justify this.

Christ, what have I written? I guess I'm just shocked and confused and sad and I don't really know how a day that started off so jovial could end in such tragedy. As of right now, 3 people died and around 200 are injured severely. I know that the numbers will only grow, in spite of our world class hospitals. Without a doubt, my thoughts will be with those who were at the finish line, I hope you return home safely wherever home is.