Learning to Live in the Aftermath of the Boston Marathon Attacks Posted by Dharmic X on 04/22/13 | Filed under Opinion

Last week, I did no writing. None whatsoever. Since starting to write for RefinedHype in June, there have only been one or two weeks that this has happened. Despite my tendency for hovering over deadlines and my terrible inability to discipline myself, I always do manage to get my piece in. As Nas put it once, my writing is “never on schedule but always on time.”

Truthfully, it was too much to keep up with that scramble in the wake of what transpired last week.

While I was born in New York City, I was raised in Boston, and still for the most part call the place home. It is a city known for its history and its people, and most importantly, for the pride these people have in being from here. Boston wears its collective heart on its sleeve, and does not take kindly to disrespect.

The last week was an endless battle of emotions. The initial reaction to Monday’s brutal attack, naturally, was fear. Was anybody that I know at the finish line or in the Marathon? Luckily, the answer for me was no, but I do know people who were directly impacted by the bombing (including someone who has a relationship to the Martin family in Dorchester). Obviously, their struggle is far more severe than mine. This attack had a direct consequence upon them.

In the hours following the attack, I stared at the television screen at home trying to figure out what was going on. Threats popped up every thirty minutes or so. A fire broke out at UMass Boston, on the other side of the city. There was no clear-cut picture of the damage that had been caused. At the same time, the attack hit home. As a teenager, I used to cross the street at the finish line to take the train home after school. Seeing something so familiar become the site of a horrific attack was mind numbing.

But the aftermath of such attacks is always the worst for someone like me. Despite being one of those Bostonian snobs who sneers every time someone from the suburbs claimed a city they only stepped their feet in to admire the scenery, would the city of Boston view me as one of their own? Would it disown me and view me as an “enemy combatant?” Would my death come at South Station, getting pushed off the platform and into an approaching train?

The day after the bombing, I traveled from Boston to New York City, wary and on-edge. The suspects had not been caught; heck they hadn’t even been described, and I expected somebody to give me at least a glance of suspicion. Amazingly, I escaped public transportation and the bus terminal completely unscathed, somehow avoiding one of those “random bag inspections.”

September to the present date has brought with it some of the most turbulent experiences I have had. From Hurricane Sandy forcing me into refugee status in Lower Manhattan to the super snowstorm that made me a captive of my own home, the elements have had me at their mercy. Part of my problem has also involved facing the consequences for placing the metaphorical vehicle that is my life on cruise control for over a year to pursue this rap life fantasy. I have no routine, no schedule, no familiarity. Each week is a strange, convoluted journey that sees me end on Friday at the very same place where I started on Monday. Four months are gone, with nothing to show for its save for a $500 check that just came in the mail today and a $50 paypal statement.

As part of this process of figuring out my future and what life really means, I make a periodical trip into New York City, to maintain that weekly radio show which was my introduction to the industry that I have grown too fond of. It is a quick in-and-out trip that lasts a little more than one day, including the four-hour long bus ride that cramps my six-foot tall frame as we journey through the barren never-ending wasteland of Connecticut.

I returned from the journey on Thursday morning, the city still on edge, military police still patrolling South Station, albeit not in significant force. One of the lasting pictures that sticks in my head is that of a missing poster for 22-year-old Sunil Tripathi, a student of Brown University who left his Rhode Island apartment over a month ago and has yet to be found. I thought of taking a picture of the poster, wondering if the boy will ever be found, noting the similarities between his life and mine.

And then all hell broke loose on Thursday night.

After showing the media the faces of the suspected terrorists (who looked like white frat boys from Boston College at first glance), a shooting took place at MIT, leaving one officer dead. Then came an armed robbery of a gas station, and what can only be described as full-on warfare in the suburban town of Watertown. At about 1AM, the whole world was abuzz at the developments, but truthfully, nobody fully understood what was going on (even though many traditional news outlets tried to pretend they did).

With media being so inconsistent in their reporting, many people (myself included) started to check into the live police scanner that the actual police on the scene were using to communicate. And close to 2AM, the scanner said something that almost destroyed my world. “Suspect number 2: Sunil Tripathi.”

Somehow, one of the two bombers of the Boston Marathon was an Indian youth.

The ramifications of such an event would be cataclysmic for someone like myself. Hindus were already the victims of mistaken identity when it came to hate crimes. Having one of our own commit this brutal atrocity (and the details of the attack are gruesome) would have put a stain upon the rest of the community, whether fair or not. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t want to believe it.

And then suddenly, it became a case of mistaken identity. Suspect number 2, the bomber still alive, became identified as a Chechnyan immigrant. What followed was the most twelve nerve-wracking hours of my entire life, hours that were spent cooped up at home in front of Twitter and the scanner, using my own Tweets as mock-therapy and a way to channel my confusion onto other people with the direct information I was reading and hearing. The whole city of Boston (and its surrounding suburbs) was put on total lockdown, ground to a halt as 9000 police officers swarmed a 20 block radius to search for a nineteen-year old kid (a kid who happened to be outside of the search radius). Arrests were being made in Brighton, in Cambridge, and in other places, and were never being announced officially.

Finally, on Friday night, we received some closure. Suspect number two was finally found and taken into custody. The city was free to return to business as usual.

The last couple of days have been spent unpacking the insanity of the last week. I was not involved in the actual manhunt, nor was I actually at the scene of the crime. As fate would have it, the previous week I had visited my doctor’s office at the Arsenal Mall in Watertown, travelled into Cambridge, and then walked past both MIT and Copley Square to get to the orange line, somehow appearing at all three epicenters of madness on the same day. But there was a war going on that nobody in Boston could escape from, and it took a toll on my mind, already battered from trying to piece together a vague, amorphous future.

This article might be a waste of time to read; after all, outside of a couple of Queensbridge rap references, it has nothing to do with rap at all. I wrote this because for two reasons: 1) Sometimes, life becomes deeper than rap. 2) I really needed to write this for myself. Rappers have the recording booth to escape their demons. I just have this word document.

And you can expect a special catch-up edition of "Overlooked" tomorrow. Life will slowly go back to normal, this was just the first piece that needed to be put in place.

p.s. - It didn't fit within the article, but this song's emotion and stream of conscious vibe helped inspire the article, so I wanted to share:

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See Also:  Nothing Is Allright: Confronting the Boston Marathon Attacks