Instructions for Dancing

by Nicola Yoon

The book of love is long and boring No one can lift the damn thing It’s full of charts and facts and figures And instructions for dancing But I I love it when you read to me And you You can read me anything —The Magnetic Fields, “The Book of Love” Almost nobody gets out of love alive. —Helen Fisher

CHAPTER 1 A Better Version of Me BOOKS DON’T WORK their magic on me anymore. It used to be that if I was in a funk or in the barren hinterland between sad and mad, I could just pluck any random one from my favorites shelf and settle into my fuzzy pink chair for a good read. By chapter three—chapter four at the very latest—I’d be feeling better. These days, though, the books are nothing but letters arranged into correctly spelled words, arranged into grammatically correct sentences and well-structured paragraphs and thematically cohesive chapters. They’re no longer magical and transporting. In a past life I was a librarian, so my books are arranged by genre. Until I started giving them away, the Contemporary Romance section was the biggest. My favorite of all time is Cupcakes and Kisses. I pull it down from my shelf and flip through it, giving it one last shot to be magical. The best scene is when the no-nonsense head chef and the sexy, constantly brooding line cook with the mysterious past have a food fight in the kitchen. They both end up covered in flour and icing. There’s kissing and a lot of dessert-related wordplay: Sugar lips. Sweet buns. Sticky situations. Six months ago this scene would have made me gooey inside. (See what I did there?) Now, though? Nothing. And since the words haven’t changed from the last time I read them, I have to admit the problem isn’t the book. The problem is me.