Instructions for Dancing

by Nicola Yoon

him too. They went ring shopping together. He proposed

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.

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.

“Hearts grow bigger so you can love more.”

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

I want to make it so no one and nothing can hurt me ever again. I want to get rid of every nice, kind, sweet, soft feeling inside myself until there’s nothing at all. No joy, but no pain either.

I don’t see darkness. In darkness there’s still hope. Some hidden thing in the places you can’t see. 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.

SOMETIMES THE ONLY thing to say about a period of time is that it’s passing and that you’re surviving it.

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 don’t want the world, Eves, just my piece of it.”

just because a thing ends doesn’t make the thing any less real. Just because everything is different now doesn’t mean we didn’t love each other once. Maybe we will again.

But as much as I want to, I can’t stop the world from changing. Time passes. People change. Lives move on.

It doesn’t matter that love ends. It just matters that there’s love.