Monday Musings

I woke up early yesterday, just as the hint of sunlight was dawning, turning the sky a cerulean ombré. Sleep has been an obstacle for me for as long as I can remember. As a child, I would tiptoe down the hall to my parents room and silently climb into their bed hoping to drift off to the lullaby of the voices of the 11 o’clock news. As an adult, I rely on fist fulls of melatonin to sedate me and often find myself awake at odd hours of the night or just as the sanitation crews commence their work. It’s a fallacy that New York is the city that never sleeps, it does, for one single hour a night and when you find yourself awake during that span it’s usually heaven. In normal times, this moment is 5am, an hour past even the latest last call and equidistant to even the most ambitious finance employee’s daily voyage down to FiDi. The city is still and quite. The streets have silenced from the lingering drunken laughs of the 20 somethings stumbling home, and the delivery trucks have yet to descend carrying their bounty. It’s usually a hopeful time, a brief second before the inertia of the city bounds forth with vengeance. But now, it’s melancholy. I sat by the window, that early morning, sipping my freshly brewed latte and took inventory of all the ways my home has changed in just a few short months. Across the way, a chic boutique hotel, once bustling with tourists and residents in search of the perfect French meal, now sits dark and vacant. The floor-to-ceiling windowed apartment whose familiar glow always kept me company in the wee hours of the morning, now devoid of belongs except one lone ladder hastily left behind in one of the countless moves out of state. Of course, the city is doing it’s best to resuscitate and as optimistic as I want to be, it’s moments like these that break my heart. I’m broken hearted for all we’ve lost, for all we may never regain. So that’s where I am this week, in search of beauty, in search of hope. May these images provide a small dose of that to you.