Boston.

“Were you at the marathon?”

“No.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yes.”

No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes.

Those are the words you fire off in the heat of the afternoon, as the news rushes in, as you try to figure out what happened. Those are the characters you type, hoping they’ll make it through a suddenly communication-embargoed city.

Cell lines are down. Text messages are failing. News is hard to judge.

No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes.

My roommate is running in the marathon. Do they have a list of the runners who have finished, so I can have some idea where she is?

No.

I’m listed as her emergency contact. We joked about it the night before. “Sure — I’ll tell my boss to let me leave work so I can come peel you off the course when you flop over,” I told her. She laughed back — a good sign she was ready to tame the mental beast of this one as well as the physical, after her first marathon had thrown her for a loop.

Now, real emergency. Real, real emergency. Horrific emergency. Do I have her mother’s phone number?

No.

The co-worker had come over, the Sox having wrapped up a win in very 2013 Sox fashion. Did you hear there was an explosion at the marathon?

No.

“Very 2013 fashion” — 2013 won’t be owned by anyone else now. It will be owned by singed blue and yellow, by the tattered streamers over the plaza I walked through Sunday. A mother from my church wanted to show her children the finish line. We walked down Boylston, past those shops. We saw them unfurl the flags. “Can you tell what countries they belong to?” I ask the children.

No.

I could tell Germany and Australia. I could tell South Africa. We stood in front of the finish line, looked up at the grandstands, pointed at the library. “Have you ever been inside there?” I asked.

No.

“It’s beautiful,” I say. “It’s like a European castle, with this big courtyard and these giant lions.” A library built to be the finest, to hold the finest, in a city built to be the finest, to hold the finest.

What I left out is that this entire area is one of my favorites, the beautiful church and the beautiful square and the beautiful Gothic light posts hanging out. I would have coffee over there so many times on my long, midweek days off as a sports freelancer. I went into Marathon Sports back there to help my runner roommate pick out racing clothes. I would walk this side of Boylston, that side, around the library and through the square, on my many trips from Park Street through the Back Bay to the Fens, all on foot. Boston is a walking city. Boston is a running city. Have you walked it?

No.

It’s spring now. We’ve started it twice and stopped it twice, our nice days engulfed by that tattered edge of April that won’t less us move on. Boston folk are used to the cold, the rain, the winter, but after the messy last few months, don’t tease. Spring should be here to stay.

On Monday, real spring was here, at least in the minds of much of Boston. Twitter flooded with Boston Marathon well-wishers, and I was clicking on things I never click on, caught in the spirit. I remembered working for the daily paper that covered Hopkinton, and the runner profiles we churned out in the weeks leading up. I remembered a pair of Stoneham citizens I interviewed who were running in memory of a brother. I remembered the feeling I get when I step out of the Cambridge YMCA on a cold day, with no coat and just shorts as the heat from my basketball playing fights off the cold. The runners would be feeling that way today, no matter what April threw at them. They would conquer it in mass, gliding on the asphalt, whether spring was ready to stay or not. Could it be any more perfect?

No.

And then it struck, the details that I didn’t want to try to put together as soon as I knew — just moments after it happened — that something horrible had happened. The historicity, the fact that it was my city, the stats and figures and explanations — I don’t want to know. I just want it to stop. Will it stop?

No.

There was crying on the phone with my mother, longer text messages to the brothers since we couldn’t get through to each other on the phone, and finally, jogging up the steps to my Cambridge home, where I opened the door, ran the length of the apartment, and hustled up the final set of stairs to see her there, real, in person. The roommate. There was a dinner of salmon and asparagus — what was supposed to be my little feast — that I made for her that night, that I made with delicacies I had bought at a ship-shape rate at a Boston institution, Haymarket, just two days before. There was lounging in front of the TV, watching 30 Rock, doing what you do when you don’t want to talk about it, read about it or hear about it anymore. Would it stop?

No.

She gave me her parents’ phone number. I gave her the number of mine.

I looked away from photos, knowing so many were so worse off than me.

I wandered back to my computer a few times, scrolling through Facebook to see how everyone was doing. A former colleague from the daily paper, with whom I had complained about marathon coverage many a time, was celebrating his first non-Marathon Monday at JFK Library (you know the rest). Friends from college had friends running Boston. Buddies from graduate school, and pals from my current life, all checked in. I had seen the pictures, the horrible pictures. So many people were hurt, so badly. Was anyone I knew hurt?

No.

And then it started. The outpouring. The boasts that Boston was different. The cheesy memes that said you don’t mess with Boston, with the mascots of its four main sports dressed for battle and staring down the camera. I smirked at that one. The earlier ones — the ones where we act like only in Boston would first responders rush to the scene so well, where something unique about us is what made this day different than just a tragedy — those were hard for me to believe. Really? Really, in the face of this, could we know such things? But this, this silly little picture, touched a nerve.

It was then that I realized what was so revolting about this whole thing. They attacked us — whoever this was — on Patriots Day, on our day to celebrate the incredible history this little city has had. They attacked us when the charity runners were going through, when the families were gathered together. They attacked us on our first day of spring, on our day to stick our noses up to the cold and say that we will have sunshine from now on. They attacked us in Boston, a city where the dirty looks and crankiness are so common and so us that a day outside its cynicism — albeit the kind of cynicism that only comes from chasing after excellence, and greatness, and worth — makes me long to be back in its safety. You think you can come in here on Patriots Day and take away spring and hope and promise?

No. Not in our city.

My friends were changing their profile pictures to the Boston skyline, but mine is already set on a cityscape of the Pru and the John Hancock Tower, shot straight down the Mass. Ave. bridge, with a sticker-covered pole framing the edge. That is my gateway, taken on a perfect spring day, as I walk the hundreds of Smoots into the city and hang a left on Boylston to trek wherever I can go. Are you going to mess with that? Are you going to mess with our city?

No.

Were you at the marathon? Are you OK?

I answered the text messages, but I don’t know what’s going on more than anyone out there. It was a day of turmoil for me, so much more than can be captured in scattered thoughts.

But humanism and Boston bravado aside, I know this. We live here because we all believe in something bigger than ourselves. You don’t come to Boston for a comfortable life, or to just paddle along in an OK career. You come here because you want to be something, to see something, to do something, to go somewhere.

That’s why we're cranky. It’s also why we run.

And wherever this goes, it’s also why we’re all getting up Tuesday, and looking to see what we can do to help, to heal, to move on and move forward. That’s what marathon runners do, after all.

We will clean our streets. We will lift our broken. We will shake our heads at the sources of it all.

But most of all, whatever our story of Marathon Monday 2013 is, we will know how to answer the questions.

Is Boston a city on a hill?

Is this nasty, unconscionable act going to be answered?

Will its people keep running?

Yes.