Dancing again
By Ashley Parrish

Every day, on my way to and from school, I pass a dance studio on the third floor of a building on Lafayette Street. The corner is marked by a Dumpster overflowing with decaying fruit from Chinatown and a stream with green-tinted water flowing into a sewer. The room has big windows and no blinds, and whenever I walk by I see couples practicing tango and waltz. One time I even caught a glimpse of a belly dancing class. There are dancers, some with leotards and leg warmers and some who wear tight pants and bound across the space bare chested, with their legs stretched, it seems, from wall to wall. I never see people come or go from this place; it seems that they are always there.

Watching from the street?in the morning as my coffee warms my hands or at night with my eyelids heavy from a busy day?I see reflections of the people in the mirrors that cover one of the walls of the studio. I can’t hear any sounds. They move across the room happy and graceful. There’s no need for music when you are three floors below looking up. The harmony is in the people, you can just imagine it.

On Sept. 11th there was no one dancing on Lafayette Street. The studio was empty, the lights were off and the streets were filled with people making their way uptown away from the terror. I was among them, evacuated from my apartment.

Three days later, when I moved back into my apartment, I walked toward that corner, wondering if those people in the studio had started to dance again. I never before was worried if the lights in the studio were on - maybe because I never doubted that they would be. It was a comfort to start and end my day by looking up to that third floor. Watching those people in that studio on Lafayette Street was a part of my ordinary routine. It was these comforts, these ordinary and even mundane details that I missed most after September 11th.

As I neared the corner with the smelly Dumpster and ugly puddle, I was half afraid to glance upwards for fear that studio would be empty. But I saw that the lights were on again. I stood there, silent, longer than I usually did. I watched those couples waltz and tango, just as they had before. I saw them leap from one wall to the other in their leotards and leg warmers. I caught them through those large windows with no blinds, smiling in the mirrors that cover that opposite wall. And even though I still couldn’t hear the music, I knew that the happy and harmonious sounds had returned, louder than before.

Ashley Parrish is a journalism student at NYU.