How We Live Our Lives Expecting

It's dark when I leave for Wednesday morning Zumba, and for a few deluded minutes I think of myself as the only one about. But when I arrive at the gym, the lights are on and the doors are open and the guy behind the desk is indeed there behind the desk, reliably amiable, asking: "You awake, yet? You ready?"

In the group exercise room, we are 20 or so rumple-haired, sleepy-eyed women only half-prepared to dance tango, flamenco, salsa, samba, Bollywood. We are women unknown to one another, save for the 75 minutes that we spend here each week, and though I do not know my companions' names, I know how they dance, I know how they laugh with all of us at all of us, I know that I am aware, week to week, when one among us has gone missing. There are so many people in our lives—the grocery-store cashier, the bank teller, the man in the barber shop who waves hello—who are known to us by their gestures, not their names, and on whom we rely, nonetheless.

This morning while we danced cha-cha under the brassy lights at the gym (and under the powerful guidance of Brenda), I looked at the women all around me and thought of Annie Le, the 24-year-old Yale graduate student and bride-to-be who was murdered just days before her wedding. I thought of how we live our lives expecting the next day to come, and the next, and of how, sometimes, we take for granted the people who people our lives. I don't want to take others for granted. I want them to know that I don't.