By Caitlin Hawke

Apart. Like we have all been for months. A Part. Like we are coming to be, of a movement.

It's now rattled our windows and shaken our walls. I don't think I will ever forget the despair-to-hope ride of the past seven days for the rest of my life. They say you forget pandemics. The worry subsides and the world returns to normal. I'm always taken aback when someone doesn't recall the AIDS crisis, especially in New York City. I fully expect for Covid-19 to recede quickly into the recesses of our minds, once it packs its bags and moves on. 

But the power harnessed by the people in our streets protesting peacefully is stunning. The tipping point is in our rear view mirror, but we don't fully trust it yet. And there's so much still to fight for.

The curfews this week have been yet another chapter in "2020: How Surreal Can It Get." Tonight, itching to flout, but mostly hoping to soak in my strange neighborhood, I took a bike ride through the Upper West Side. Below are some images from that ride. As much as I want my city back and for the virus to remain under control, I also want the roots of what is happening to go down deep and buckle the macadam, rendering the old byways unpassable and forcing us to lay down new ones. 

It's almost as if the fact that we were apart enabled so many to become a part of this. Certainly the fact of our limbo helped hasten the outrage about the senseless murder of George Floyd, galvanized by the inequities of Covid's toll. 

I'm still thinking about Ex Uno Plures and E Pluribus Unum. Written only two months ago. I find myself believing that it's coming to fruition before our eyes. But "2020: How Surreal Can It Get" has many a chapter to go.

UWS Curfew Gallery: Part 1 - Hell You Talmbout
​​The first images I noted were these solemn panels -- memorials to victims of police brutality. If you haven't heard Janelle Monáe's song, it is what was going through my head when I saw these blades.

​(Keep scrolling down for more images; to view the gallery properly, click on the blog title to view it online).

If you received this in an email subscription, to listen to Janelle Monáe's "Hell You Talmbout" please click on the blog title to view the post online.

UWS Curfew Gallery: Part 2 - Lincoln's Center Under Cover

UWS Curfew Gallery: Part 3 - On Broadway Where Wood Meets Glass Under Bright Neon Lights

UWS Curfew Gallery: Part 4 - Check Point Nine Six
After 8 p.m., no through traffic is permitted south of 96th Street these days. I rode freely up the middle of the avenue toward home past a deserted 87th Street.

Below, a police officer checks in with a driver and let's him pass.

​In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space
In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face
I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other times it's only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

​-- Bob Dylan, "Every Grain of Sand"

By Caitlin Hawke

West End Avenue is deafeningly silent early this morning as the curfew has curtailed most car traffic south of 96th Street. It's a street I recognize less and less yet one that I've come to know deeply. I find myself studying it. Each bird chirping. Each passerby. Each delivery truck. Each siren. Each neighbor at his or her window in my sightlines. All targets of my gaze in a way I have never gazed before.

Looking out my window in sleepy Bloomingdale all day today I perceived a strange vibrato. Tension thick in the air. Anticipation. Trepidation. And the gaze from apartment to street of all these neighbors still cooped up is one of watchful, worried eyes. The First Wave scarcely receded, the Second Wave is roiling and swiftly rolling in.

But I am not talking about the virus. Like a Rube Goldbergian contraption, infection has become the vector of infection. Instead of picking up with some semblance of normalcy coming off the first wave of coronavirus, we are now again waist deep in. Begat by the first wave but not precisely in its own image, the Second Wave of which I speak looks and feels very much like a growing revolution, where people the city over -- the country and the world over -- have been swept up as it crests. 

Chalked on sidewalks, hung from windows, held up in protest posters each day at 1pm in Straus Park, called out by peaceful congregants making their noontime way down Broadway, the revolution beckons: manifest in support of justice for all, manifest in opposition to police brutality, manifest in acknowledgment of the grotesque and disproportionate toll Covid-19 has had on people of color.

The solidarity of the Second Wave equals that of the first, but its fury surpasses it. Both share uncharted waters, unpredictable consequences, unimaginable cost, unfathomable pain.

Experts tell us that there will be another wave of viral infections. But they didn't tell us that our social isolation would finally make us immune to complacency and catapult us into the work we must now do. 

I'm still too jaded to believe that in corona there could be salvation. But at a minimum there is transformation. And we are most definitely not coming out of this the same.  Prepare ye.

Above photos courtesy of Sharon Waskow

Daily protest near Straus Park near W. 106th Street, where neighbors gather at 1 p.m.