Mackenzie Filson

monday’s fortune;


{monday’s thai food fortune cookie.}

monday we overslept.
my brother was on a plane home at 9:30am. mom and i ate thai, until at 2:50 pm my mom looked over my shoulder to see what everyone in the restaurant was staring at on the television.
“ooh! the runners two blocks away from the finish line.”

somehow i knew this couldn’t be right. without my glasses on, i felt this was fishy.
i knew from half-wrecklessly running a half marathon a few years ago that the majority of runners would be finishing around 2:50 in the afternoon.
it seems that someone else knew that, too. curse my mom and i’s poor eye sight.

in a lot of ways, i’m still in shock. the blasts were around 2-3 blocks away from my school. seven students from my school were injured. it’s also the origin of where i first got smitten over boston.
first saw that library rotunda. bought my dried apricots from trader joe’s. get caught by pushy canvassers on my way home.
aimlessly wandered on tuesday afternoons when i had nothing else to do but gawk at buildings and residents of this little city.

in these situations, i can’t even be angry. anger is what your bully wants to see. sadness is what these people feed on.
as a younger sister of an older brother with a penchant for wrestling and light-hearted sibling fighting, i know that you never show that person you’re upset. that’s what they’re looking for. the sooner you stop showing sadness and anger, the sooner the person in question leaves you alone. terrorism, while terrifying, is only successful if terror is sensed in the victims.

boston is better than that.
if you’ve ever gone to a sox game, or a farmer’s market in the italian end, you know these people won’t back down. they will insult your mother. they will be the first to drop their “r”s in conversation, but also the first to fight for you.
if there is anything i feel from yesterday’s events, it’s even more love for this city.

i’ve grown up here, these last few years. i became a fully functioning adult here. and i’m lucky to live here, if not for the people i’ve met, but for the people i haven’t met, who i got to see run yesterday.

not just running in the marathon, but for the running they did towards the destruction that tore up so many people’s lives, wrecked their dreams of finishing 26.2 miles in boston, rendered them a little less innocent to the things that a small fraction of a fraction of a percentage of the world decide to bring into this world.

because that’s the truth of it. that’s why i can’t be angry or sad.
because these things can’t wreck my view of “humanity” because the people who do these things are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the population.
and the runners and helpers towards those people in the blasts outnumber them in the millions and billions.

if you need any more proof of this, click the links below:

the google person finder
runners run to mgh to give blood after marathon
cowboy hat hero saves lives at marathon
13 examples of people being awesome after the bombing
red cross: how to help (apparently, they’ve exceeded what they need. humanity wins again)
to boston, from kabul, with love


Filed under: mackenzie Tagged: boston, boston i love you, broston, college life, girl why you gotta be so deep, lessons
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