Features

Late at night, I walk. I have lived in New York for seven years and as much as I appreciate the jubilant crowds and vibrancy that exists on the city’s streets, I enjoy being alone. Alone with my thoughts. Space is a luxury and my thoughts require silence and space. Still, it is eerie.

I go out as late as possible and to walk as long as I possibly can, both for exercise and safety. The idea being that, even though COVID has reshaped the world, New York won’t be able to shake the notion that walking alone at night is dangerous. Now, I don’t want to interact with anyone. No one does. We must make space for ourselves. And for me, that space just so happens to be at 1:20am.

Eastern Parkway is silent, as if a car would kick up the disease like a puddle of water. Maybe no one has anywhere to be. I plan on walking the length of Eastern Parkway, all the way to Prospect Park. The streets are lit by street lights but the darkness feels heavier than normal. I look in windows of apartments, which appear empty. Entire blocks of buildings show no signs of life. I know they are in there. I feel them hiding. Trash collects on the streets. Masks and gloves flutter like tumbleweeds in the wind. City workers can’t work, I think to myself. On arriving at the Brooklyn Museum, I feel uneasy. When does something cease to have purpose and become a monument of the past. 

The day before I watched The Hot Rock on the floor of my apartment. The film is an elaborate and flawed heist that takes place at the Brooklyn Museum and was shot in the 70s but the museum still looks unchanged. There’s something surreal about touching something that was just out of reach, almost disappointing. It looked better from my screen, my window. I need to keep walking, I say to myself. Hearing my voice is comforting. I am alone in an uneasy time, but the quiet grounds me. I pass by the Library and Grand Army Plaza and peer inside the dark forest. “Dangerous walking alone at night,” I say out loud, and turn around heading north.

I zigzag through streets that I’ve never walked before. Peering into windows of shops that appear to have been closed for years. I wish I can say I feel self-conscious, for fear of being watched, but I’m not. When I was young, my father drove me up to central California to see a ghost town. A preserved home that was abandoned and now, serves no purpose. I feel like a child again, debating if anyone would care who broke a storefront’s window. I walk towards home.

The long silent hallway greets me as I enter my building. It’s late, I know, but there is no sign of life. “Everyone’s hiding,” I say, realizing that someone might hear me. Quietly, not to wake my roommates, I enter and set the lock back in place. The apartment is warm as I flick on the light over my desk and sit. My forehead is cold and numb and I rub it trying to collect my thoughts from my walk. I look out the window. The heavy looming quiet peers back at me. I open my journal and write.

“I think about the optimists who say things will go back to normal, as if the world was meant to be this way (or the way it was.) For them, there were no other worlds before, there were no dark human realities. None of them even realized it until today that change can actually happen. I think about the pessimists that paint signs of the “END IS NIGH” inside their skulls, pinning bulletin boards of thoughts together with thin red yarn stretching end to end, and in the middle of it all are photos of themselves, the protagonist. Both unable to accept the impending shift. Both emotional and working tirelessly with what they have left to preserve what’s known, safety and justice. They differ only in their views of the “dream,” this new expanse we’re soon to roam. One says the dream will return and the other is convinced that this change has killed it forever. I personally think that none of this is a dream at all and that is hard to swallow.

Andrew Alexander is an illustrator, cartoonist and printmaker currently working in Brooklyn who is pursuing an MFA at the School of Visual Arts. His poem "Under Watchful Care" is included in this issue. Andrew is sometimes known as AndyAlexAndy.