Dancing in the Dark

When I was a sophomore in college, I joined the Dance Company, mostly to keep myself busy during a long and dark season of heartbreak. That spring it came time for our recital and all the other dancers started choreographing group routines and their solo pieces. Everyone except for me. I was too insecure.

The truth was that I had a dance that permeated my mind and was begging to be let out onto the stage. I didn’t tell anyone, but an African lullaby called my name. In this dance, I started out in a crouched position and then began rising and swaying, rising a swaying to the gentle rhythm. I had a single spotlight on me, casting shadows of my form all around, my arms and legs elongated.

I never did that solo. But I do remember listening to that song over and over again, alone in my bare, stripped down dorm room with the lights off. Maybe I had a candle lit. Maybe I danced in that cramped space, rocking back and forth. It was a bittersweet moment. I was leaving school for the summer. That dance will forever be locked in my imagination, shut like the door to that tiny dorm room as I left for the last time.

I should have danced that solo. The void still leaves me with an ache, all these years later. I looked up the words to that African song a few years ago, and it’s actually a political statement, not a lullaby like I thought. It’s mournful and wistful, like my heart at the time, as I bore a deep wound from the breakup of my first love. 

I should never have stopped dancing. Never stopped turning that pain into something pure and true. Something strong and graceful. Given the chance to do it all over again, I would do so many things differently. I would have shined in that dark auditorium. I would have let go of all my fears and insecurities. I would have danced.