Winter Musings

- Sarah Farooqui, English-I

Slowly. Softly. As light as the drizzle on grass, she twirled and pranced. Her salmon-pink chiffon-skirt swayed in ringlets and the gold embroidery shimmered unevenly. Her whole body moved rhythmically. Her arms curved gracefully. I knew there was music inside the room. The finesse of her movements made me hear the instruments. Standing outside on the road, surrounded by the blaring traffic and harsh neon lights, I was staring at the small girl in a dance studio practice. She must have been 10 years old. The main room of the dance studio faced the road. There were large glass-windows open to the world. Soft gold and bronze light washed the wooden flooring. The whole room from outside looked like a gold and brown nest. Bare and spacious, yet cozy and comfortable.

If only I could be 10 again. Not a worry. Not a care. A simple life, but a precious life. As she twirled to the unheard music, I felt jealousy trickle down my body. She was so unaware. So unconscious. Her only source of consciousness was her movement. Suddenly, I wanted that. I wanted to have that one thing to concentrate on and loose myself in for just a moment. She never saw me. Or I don’t think she did. She was so engrossed in her movements that I could have stood there all night and she would not have seen me. I don’t know what form of dance she was practicing. But she was so astounding that I stood there on the road, at 6.30 on a winter evening mesmerized. Suddenly she stopped and looked at the door in the opposite side of the room. Her back was facing me. I noticed her tiny shoulders. Her small hands and her skinny legs. She was such a small person that suddenly her size fascinated me. Was I ever that tiny? I wondered as I stared at my own plough sized hands. Suddenly she stopped. She looked behind and ran through the door into the next room. Within a second the lights of the studio were switched off. I stood there for a second and then started to walk. The cold air was biting my face. I wrapped my hands around myself and looked down as the wind blew in my direction. I had just spent half an hour of my life musing and staring at a little girl dance.

The street lights were switched on. The benches on the side of the pavements stared longingly at passersby. Nobody stopped. Nobody noticed. Who was she I wondered. What was her story? Where did she go… what did she do? She was just a little girl I saw but she was in my story. I looked at the rows of neatly kept houses. The perfectly manicured lawns and the gleaming cars. I wondered if the little girl lived in any of these houses. Who were they, the ones inside? We all exist together. Yet what did we know about one another. We walk pass each other, we see each other, we live together… then why are we so alone? Introspective moods. A sudden longing for importance. Random musings on a winter night.

In my story, she is a little girl who I had watched dancing on a winter evening. She fascinated me. Not just because she was so good at it, but because she made me think about something I would never have thought had I not seen her… or felt. We can go on living our whole lives without feeling so much. Think of the many possible feelings out there waiting to be felt. Can they be listed? The thoughts that we may never think…the sensations that we may never experience. The empty possibilities. For half an hour that evening she made me feel. She made me think. In this world of lonely empty benches and un-walked streets, one should be grateful for a thought, a sensation. We should look at those strangers who are nameless and whose faces we don’t remember a second after we pass them, and realize their importance in our life. So many of them make us think. They don’t need to look at us. They don’t need to even feel us. But they are there. Unknowingly, unnoticing they make differences in lives. As I arrived at the bus station I looked at the glowing windows of the houses. So many people. So many possibilities. We all exist together, but what do we know about each other? I unconsciously stared into a window of a house a few paces away. My bus came. I sat and looked back at the window. A man was standing. I did not concentrate on him enough for his presence to enter my consciousness. The bus moved. My thoughts changed. The man at the window was looking at me.