Re: Boston

You take love where you can get it. You feel where there's space.

I saw a Facebook status, from a boy I used to go to school with, early on Tuesday morning, after everyone had heard about the attack. He was talking about a picture he'd seen on the internet - a man being hurried away in a wheelchair, both of his legs blown off, and saying that it was "sick" and "disgusting" that the photographer had stopped to capture that. He said it was insensitive. I disagree. I think we need to be sensitised, to a point.

Warning: very, very graphic, haunting, disturbing. But the picture is here.

Twitter, of course, was very different to Facebook in reaction. It thrives at a chance to reach out for connection, it makes everything oddly human. Billy Baker, a reporter for the Boston Globe, was posting updates in the moment, the kind that you just don't feel in that same way when they come from the "big news", the anonymous TV and radio sources.

You hear "2 dead, 22 injured" and it doesn't mean a thing. it is a statistic, it doesn't seem like humans, each one of those doesn't sound like a life. But pictures do, and stories do - the one man rushing to call his mom, the Chinese student that was killed, a woman with a phone running to get home.

In primary school, we held a two minutes' silence every 11th November for Rememberance Day. They told us "Remember them". As a little girl, I spent those two minutes wringing my hands, stealing glances up and around, wondering why I couldn't feel as sad as I was being told to be. It made me so very guilty, but I felt so distant. It was a number. It was blearly photographs on PowerPoints in the assembly hall. Delicate paper poppy badges sold in grass green boxes, by the chosen Year 6s with the smartest ties. As I got older, I started trying to create a character in my head. If there was one of these great anonymous soldiers in my head with a name, and hair, and a family and pets, would it feel real and could I mourn?

We need social media because we need each other. The feeling of loss of an individual is stronger than surrealist statistics and numbers, that we're told are shocking and terrible. They aren't until you see it, and you hear it. And then it is. And then it is.

The coming together of everyone, those tweeting helpline numbers and those in Boston offering water and electricity from their homes to strangers made me think about how amazing humanity is, given the proximity to reach out to each other. The worldwide level of support made me thing of the London riots last year. And it made me wonder about 9/11, and what if this was around then, and then was reminded of a woman I met recently who was telling me about all of her ideas about if Twitter had been around during the Civil Rights movement. It goes on.

It's just incredible how we come together in crisis, through love. Internet or no internet. And it's such a strange feeling that it takes something so terrible and upsetting to make this happen. It's so confusing to be filled with anger, disappointment and misanthropy.

and to be, at the same time, very, very grateful.