Instructions for Dancing

by Nicola Yoon

That love stories are like fairy tales: you’re not meant to believe in them forever.

It’s funny how a day can start out just like any other and end up so different. Sometimes I wish there were a weather report for your life. Tomorrow’s forecast is for routine high school shenanigans in the morning, but with dramatic parental betrayal by late afternoon, ending with wild emotional despair by nightfall. Details after the next commercial break.

Given enough time, all love stories turn into heartbreak stories. Heartbreak = love + time.

Yes, falling in love requires a leap of faith. But people only jump because they don’t know what the ground looks like. They believe their landing will be soft. That the ground is covered in soft stuff—feathers, down pillows, fluffy baby blankets, the shaggiest shag carpeting. But I’ve seen the ground. It is covered in lethal spikes fashioned from the bones of other jumpers. The fall is not at all survivable.

Isn’t that the one good thing about being a grown-up? You know better?” He scoffs. “They don’t know shit. They’re just better at pretending.”

Fucking A!

Happiness is tricky. Sometimes you have to fight for it. Sometimes, though—the best times—it sneaks up behind you, wraps an arm around your waist and pulls you close.

Why are grown-ups constantly surprised that we kids grow up? I’m pretty sure that’s what we’re supposed to do.

months. It occurs to me that an unhappy ending for one person can mean a happy beginning for another,

I think about the way we’re all just starring in our own stories.

It was beautiful. But it was sad too. Both things, and at the same time. I don’t know why so much of life is like that.

Maybe the whole point of love is to make more of itself.

Sometimes the world is full of such abounding joy, it’s hard to know what to do with it all. —

get very, very lucky in this life, then you get to love another person so hard and so completely that when you lose them, it rips you apart. I think the pain is the proof of a life well lived and loved.”

I don’t know why we lose the people we love and how we’re expected to go on after we lose them. But I know that to love is human. We can’t help ourselves. The philosopher-poets say love is the answer, but it’s more than that. Love is the question and the answer and the reason to ask in the first place. It’s everything. All of it.”

Grief to me feels like an endless landscape of white light. No secrets. And no surprises either. You can see clearly all you have lost. Everything that’s no longer there.

I love you, but you’re going to die, so I can’t love you? I can’t because I’m scared I won’t survive the pain? Or, that’s not right. I’m not scared I won’t survive the pain. I’m scared the pain will never end and I’ll have to live with it forever. The problem with broken hearts isn’t that they kill you. It’s that they don’t.

I see my mom, soft, brave and vulnerable. Everyone says there’s a moment in your life when your parent becomes more than just a parent and becomes a real person. They never said how scary that moment would be. And wonderful too.

I’m mad at whatever force created a world where we are born to love and also to watch the people we love die. People who say it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all have never really loved anyone and never really lost anyone either.