Damn extended metaphors

"It has to be partly her doing. It takes two to tango."
"Not always."
"Then it's hardly much of a dance, is it?"
"She doesn't want to dance yet."
"Then why is she trying on shoes so soon?"

I'm like an old notebook. On the outside, you can get something of an idea of what I'm about, signatures; trying out new pens, a poorly-done picture of a guitar, the corner of the cover is bent backwards, and some smudged snippets of Edgar Allen Poe in sharpie. If you take the time to open me up though, you can never unsee what you might find. On some pages songs and poems, photographs of sunny afternoons and starry nights. Pages filled with joyous memoirs, that you can still smell the perfume of lovers on. Turn to the next, and your expectation-filled smile will be wiped away. The corner of the page is brown from flame, and the words on the page are frightening and dark. The whisper tales of self-loathing, cold, lonely evenings, envy, heartache, melancholy, and denial of love and life. You feel the breath pulled out of your mouth when you find this. You want to tear out the page and throw it away so it can't tarnish everything else in the notebook. You try, but you can't. The bad memories won't fix themselves, and neither can you. You just have to let it be. You do the first thing that comes to mind. You take hold of a pen. Royal blue. Press it against a blank spot and begin writing on the warm pages.