Betty Cooper Quotes

...my father had been born from the minds of writers. I believed the Great Creator had flown these writers on the backs of thunderbirds to the moon and told them to write me a father. Writers like Mary Shelley, who wrote my father to have a gothic understanding of the tenderness of all monsters. It was Agatha Christie who created the mystery within my father and Edgar Allan Poe who gave darkness to him in ways that lifted him to the flight of the raven. William Shakespeare wrote my father a Romeo heart at the same time Susan Fenimore Cooper composed him to have sympathy toward nature and a longing for paradise to be regained. Emily Dickinson shared her poet self so my father would know the most sacred text of mankind is in the way we do and do not rhyme, leaving John Steinbeck to gift my father a compass in his mind so he would always appreciate he was east of Eden and a little south of heaven. Not to be left out, Sophia Alice Callahan made sure there was a part of my father that would always remain a child of the forest, while Louisa May Alcott penned the loyalty and hope within his soul. It was Theodore Dreiser who was left the task of writing my father the destiny of being an American tragedy only after Shirley Jackson prepared my father for the horrors of that very thing.

Betty, whom I recently discovered sorting through the contents of my suitcase, turns on the overhead light in my room, wrinkles her brow, and peers in like a camp counselor on an inspection tour, as if she suspects I might be entertaining someone who has paddled in from across the lake. She must keep an eye out. I am a schemer. There are things going on behind her back, plans afoot, she fears. She has no intention of cooperating with any of them. When the phone rings, she listens to every word, not sure if she can trust me with her independence. I don’t blame her. I am an unlikely guardian. A month ago I thought the Medicare doughnut hole was a breakfast special for seniors. I am a care inflictor. She’s

In this town of nightmares, you and Jughead found each other. That's real.

Sometimes I feel like I have the spines of a hedgehog. They are a spiky barrier I just can’t retract. I thought I’d managed to lower them a little over the last few months, or at least to thin them out. But then, this week, there they were again: abrupt, prickly, impenetrable. I’ve had a weird, frustrated, angry week. Nothing in particular has happened, but it’s hot, I’m insanely busy at work and not everyone’s being co-operative. But more than that, I feel as though my body’s drawn in on itself. Everything feels and smells wrong. Quite often, just the sound of the radio has been too much for me. If Herbert has tried to talk to me at the same time that it’s on, I’ve barked at him. I can’t bear to be touched. I feel like my skin is too thin. Twice this week I’ve rushed out of bed in the middle of the night, convinced I’ve felt a glut of blood surge out over my legs. Twice I’ve realised I was only dreaming. The mind is slow to catch up with the body. Mine, it seems, is fearfully protective of it. I’m a meditator, and I know that these phases are necessary. Meditation is like the slow action of water on rock. Gradually, it wears through layers and layers of sediment, and every now and then something unknown is exposed to the light, a deposit of ancient bones. These too are eased away in time, but they must be revealed to be soothed away. Over the years, I’ve learned how my body holds an imprint of my fears, a physical defence against them that over the years becomes an immovable ache. This morning, for example, I went to yoga class, only the second one since my gynaecological problems made me give up. Once, I could fold myself in half like a deck-chair, not because of my yogi prowess, but because I had double-jointed hips. Today, I was shocked to discover that I couldn’t bend at all, that my pelvic girdle had tightened itself into a rigid knot. Once I’d got over the flush of humiliation (a seventy-year-old woman was performing a perfect forward bend next to me), I saw just how much I’ve been imagining my body as a fragile thing in need of protection. I have been curled inwards like that hedgehog, and even the parts of my body that I can’t command have joined in. But even realising this, what do I do with the information? It is one thing to understand that my body has rolled up to protect itself, but how can I make it unfurl?

I think you might be the death of me. And its as if I'm running at full speed towards my grave.

I find myself missing you before you're even gone, knowing there exists a space without you next to me. A somewhere I never want to fell too comfortable in.

I do everything for everyone. Everything to be perfect. The perfect daughter, the perfect sister, the perfect student. Can't I do this one thing for me?