Unrelenting Evocations of the Past

*BANG* the cooking sheet fell to the floor with a clatter, dropped from Hakim’s singed hands of. How did I manage to forget my oven mitts??, thought Hakim as he ran over to the sink and stuck his hands under the cool running water. Relief washed over him, and he walked back to pick up the cookies from the ground, this time armed with the oven mitts which he had placed by the side of the oven in preparation, but had completely forgotten about by the time the cookies were finished. At least they managed to stay on the sheet, Madison would’ve killed me if I didn't have them ready for tonight.

Hakim bent down to pick the chocolate-chip cookies up from the ground, and placed them down on the counter, where they would likely stay until 6:00 PM, when Madison and her parents came over for their weekly dinner. 

Glancing down at his hands once again, he realized that they were actually burnt worse than he had thought. Hakim lifted his left hand up to his face to look more closely, and was instantly transported back to a day now almost 9 years ago...

Wafting into his nose was a smell at once immediately familiar, and at the same time impossibly strange. He smelled smoke, but with a distinctly metallic tinge, one which he had never noticed until now. Hakim was confused. One second he had been watching triumphant runners cross the finish line, as he had every year since he had first moved to Boston at the age of 5, and the next he was…

(On the ground?)

He opened his eyes, and saw (snow?, no…). The sky, which a few long seconds ago had been a picturesque blue with scattered clouds, on a beautiful Boston spring day, was now completely obscured. The clouds had turned to shreds, and descended now onto Hakim’s disoriented face. The nearest of these shreds works its way in slow-motion towards the ground, and towards Hakim, who felt it fall into the upturned palm of his hand. It’s paper, but why…

All at once, the reality of his situation hit him. A ringing in his ears began to grow gradually in volume, obscuring all but the loudest of the outside sounds. These sounds seemed, to Hakim, to be far away, muffled almost as if he was underwater. First to reach his ears was a familiar sound, the rapidly approaching sirens which become such a regular background track to life in the city. More immediately, and far more shocking, was the sound of (screams?) the formerly joyous Marathon watchers and finishers. Their voices, previously enthusiastic and congratulatory, were now filled with an entirely different emotion... fear. 

Jolted finally into action, but still too dazed to do anything more, Hakim rolled onto his side. There, next to him, was a sight which Hakim almost couldn’t comprehend, his vision still blurry so shortly after (the explosion?) he regained his senses.

No, no, no… 

Lying face-down amidst the falling paper, the smoke drifting through the air, and the legs of people running around frantically looking for their loved ones, was his best friend, Madison. She was sprawled on the ground, motionless in a scene of otherwise frantic activity. Madison, the girl who 9 years later was the woman Hakim loved, was injured, badly.

Her leg was covered with a mottled red pattern, a pattern which, in the form of burn scars, would be with Madison for the rest of her life. With great effort, Hakim pushed himself to his hands and knees, ignoring the pain shooting up his left arm, and crawled to Madison’s side. He collapsed to the ground next to her, and, unable to hear if she was breathing, stuck his hand in front of her face. Feeling the faint breath emanating from her mouth, Hakim momentarily felt a wave of relief crash over him. Relief, that is, until he actually looked down at the hand in front of her face. 

The patchwork formation of burns on Madison’s leg had looked bad, but when he saw his own left arm, Hakim fell back to the ground, once again in a state of shock. Running up the entirety of his left arm was the same red pattern which would stay with him for the rest of his life. Immediately the source of the metallic smoky smell which had been the first sensory detail Hakim noticed after the explosion became all too clear. Emanating up from his arm was the pungent odor of burned flesh. Unable to pull his eyes away from his mutilated arm, Hakim was taken by surprise when he was pulled to the side, away from Madison.

The first responders had arrived, and crowded around Madison, obscuring Hakim’s view of his good friend. “Madison!”, he screamed, his voice hoarse from the smoke which still hung in the air. One man looked back, and said gently “Don’t worry, she’s going to be ok”, and then she was gone, rushed off to the nearest ambulance.

People still rushed all around him, but no one seemed to notice the 15-year old boy kneeling on the ground, momentarily all alone. With the haze in the air, the ringing in his ears, and his body still in shock, Hakim’s senses were all still temporarily muted. With his sense of smell having been unaffected, he was left, sitting on the sidewalk, with only the smell of his ruined arm to keep him company.

All at once the screams of those suffering around him rose to the forefront of his mind again, for a second feeling almost almost ear-piercingly real. The ringing in his ears in that awfully memorable moment was rivaled only by those screams, those screams which are here with him now once again… wait, that’s… realizing that here, now, the shriek of the tea kettle is the only sound in his small one-bedroom apartment, Hakim is finally pulled away from his painful remembrance of that horrible day on April 15, 2013.

Of course, now that it’s on his mind, Hakim, will not be able to escape his thoughts of that day. When that bomb went off, killing 3 and injuring over 200 at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, Hakim’s life was thrown off the rails. A sophomore at Everett High School back in 2013, Hakim had escaped the bombing with just the burns on his arm, which troubled him for a time, but would eventually heal. He was, fortunately, able to recover physically from that horrible day. Mentally, however, there was really no telling how many people would have that trauma stick with them for the rest of their lives.

And the bullying, well, that was the reason Hakim considered dropping out of school in both his junior and senior years. He had, in the summer after his sophomore year, tried to do everything possible to distance himself from his memories of that day. He stopped talking to Madison, who was recovering from her own serious injuries, and their previously blossoming friendship wilted into nothing, as she was too powerful a reminder for Hakim. He threw himself into other projects, like going to a summer camp for writers (his dream job), and beginning to do some of his own writing. Inexorably, however, his stories ended up bringing him back to that day, the tragedy that he and so many others had experienced almost tangible in every word he wrote.

Despite his best efforts, when Hakim arrived at school the next year, he was immediately thrust into a world of almost constant bullying. Being Muslim (his family had emigrated from Pakistan when he was 5 years old), he had always had to deal with Islamophobia growing up, but it had reached new heights in the wake of the bombing. Terrorism and Islam were conflated in the minds of far too many of his classmates, and their fear was projected in the form of bullying. Hakim, one of the only people at his school who had experienced the terror of the bombing firsthand, was forced to relive it time after time by his ignorant classmates, simply because of his name, his religion, and his status as an immigrant to the United States. 

Hakim also carried with him at all times the scars which reminded him constantly of the pain he had endured in the wake of the bombing. 9 years later, however, he had managed to overcome the crippling weight of those thoughts with the help of Madison, with whom he had reconnected after high school, and started dating in 2018. It wasn’t all that often anymore that his memories came back to him so vividly, as they just had.

All because of that smell...

*Ding-dong* Must be Madison.

“Coming!”, yelled Hakim, rushing over to the door to open it and greet his girlfriend. And there she was, as beautiful as ever, sitting in front of him. He bent down to give her a hug, and then looked up to her parents. 

“Come in, come in, sorry I’m not completely ready, but I got distracted while I was making dessert.” 

They all started to enter, and he said “Here, let me”. Leaning down, he grabbed the handles of Madison’s wheelchair, and brought her in for a happy family dinner. Their injuries from that day may still be evident, but with each other's help, they had managed to move on, and to find happiness in each other and in the life that they led together.