Like the Movies

In the movies the blast knocks the badass down, but he rolls and gets back up. He’s got the grey streaks of dust on his face to show that he’s truly hard. In the movies, when he gets hit and there’s a gash on his head, he grits his teeth and makes an angry face because he’s focused. He wants to avenge his wife; he knows he has to save the kid from the burning building; he won’t let anyone kidnap his daughter. In the movies, the dark red makeup is plastered to his face, it doesn’t ooze from his wound and drip into his eye. In the movies it almost looks fun. 

It’s not like the movies.

Skin rips and flesh breaks and people die and scream and cry and many stay silent because there’s nothing left to say. There are no streaks of grey ash, there’re brown clumps of dirt hanging to everyone like a fashion trend. The clouded dusty air makes it impossible to breathe. Seeing faces twisted into pain becomes so normal that a calm face would stand out in the crowd. The calm face of that actor, delivering his line with the fire around him. No pithy one liner can be heard over the roaring fire and chaos that erupted from the ground, even if there was someone to give it. The people who know what they’re doing, the police, the paramedics, the firemen, the ones they make movies about, their faces aren’t twisted in a confident smile. They don’t summersault around debris and hop from building to building, their voices don’t ring out over the chaos and comfort the world, a camera couldn’t follow them through the running and screaming of horrified civilians, they don’t pick up the uninjured flailing boy with grey streaks of dust on his forehead. They haul ass to a stretcher, hands shaking with the rest of them, and lift the blood-slippery man on to it. They choke back the puke as the stench of blood overwhelms their senses. They pull person after person out and away, and fight their instincts in order to go back in again. They’re heroes because they have the same terrified look as the dirt encrusted men and women, smashed to a bloody pulp beneath the slab of concrete, not because their hair stays in place when a bullet whizzes by their head. Not because they kick down a door, and duck from the path of a grenade. Like the movies. The movies that place no value on the lives of the hired men of the villain, even though they have families to go home to too. The movies that, desensitize, romanticize death and call it justice, and make brutal murder look interesting and cool. The movies that make me want to do something exciting and dangerous. The movies that don’t show the runner who having just run 26 miles, had his legs blown off in an explosion, and was carried off with his thigh bone drying in the thick dusty air and his blood forever stained on the corpses nearby.

There was an explosion in Boston today. And it was not like the movies.

4.15.2013