#also i will never shut up about our childhood besties from the drama

[marymekpop]

a daily dose of sunshine & wisdom

[real-good-now]

Letters to Juliet: Chapter 2

Summary: Betty Cooper dreamed of falling in love. She once thought it would be with the red-headed boy next door until he met the mysterious brunette in the pearl necklace.So, when she begins to receive anonymous love letters, she turns to the only person she knows who is not grossly in lust: her childhood best friend, Jughead Jones.

Chapter begins below the cut

    I sit there and let the minutes pass by as I try to process the note I have just received. A love letter? To me? It can't be real, right? No one could possibly be this enamored with me. It's impossible. The feelings in this letter are reminiscent of the love in a Shakespearean sonnet, but I am not a romantic heroine. I am Betty Cooper: boring, blonde, and generic with way too much baggage for any high-school-aged boy to ever take on. My thoughts cannot linger too long on the letter, though, because Jughead enters the office. "Whatcha got there, Betts?" I jump a little in my seat, replying with a curt "Nothing" and quickly shoving the letter into my bag, to be dealt with at another time.     "Wow, Betty, that's not suspicious at all..." He takes his spot at the table across from me and opens up his laptop. "I guess, after all of these years of friendship, you really can't trust me. You know what they say: secrets, secrets are no fun..."     "...unless you share with everyone!" I finish. "Yeah, yeah, I know what they say but I also don't understand how a wordsmith like you could possibly agree with a statement that defies the very definition of a secret, Mr. Jones."

“Touché, Ms. Cooper. Touché,” he says, nodding at me with his signature smirk.

This is always one of my favorite parts of the day.

    For the most part, my school days are pretty routine. I show up early. I tutor or speak with my teachers. I go to homeroom, where I catch up with Archie or get harassed by my darling cousin, Cheryl. Then are classes, where I drown myself in my work and immerse myself in equations and stoichometry. Lunch with V and Kevin follows, where they gossip and I nod along like I can keep up with the drama. More classes. Cheer practice where I try to keep up with the squad. Home to do homework and make dinner. Then I prepare myself to do it all over again.

    The only thing that breaks up the monotony is my time at the Blue and Gold. Here I have a purpose. Here I am a leader. Sure, it is a high school newspaper with only one writer besides myself, but it is something that I take pride in.

Plus, Jughead’s presence doesn’t hurt.

    He is funny, smart, and sarcastic. We work seamlessly as a detective duo and when it comes to our editor/journalist relationship, we are a well-oiled machine. He challenges me mentally and makes me strive to be a better editor because I want to make him a better writer. It is his way out of this town and, if anyone deserves a break from the bad hand they were dealt, it is him. His mother left with his only sister a couple years ago and all he has is his dad, who wasn’t reliable as an adult, let alone a father for quite some time. He also had to serve his time in prison when his role in the cover up of Jason Blossom’s murder was brought to light, leaving Juggie orphaned and forced to stay with the Andrews’ for a while.

    We have an easy friendship and our time in the Blue and Gold office only brings us closer. He genuinely cares about me and I, him. He makes me smile, even when I am feeling down on myself. He listens to my worries and eases them with the wave of a hand and a warm hug. In return, I am the only person he is able to completely open up to about his home life. We just get each other.

“You okay?” He asks.

    “What? Fine! I’m fine. Just zoned out a little.” As try to refocus my attention back to our latest issue that goes to print at the end of the week, I remember this morning. “Hey, I saw you talking to Veronica this morning and it looked pretty intense. What was that about?”

    The question seems to take him by surprise and he stutters a few times before settling on, “Oh, it was nothing. Just something about Archie she need for her anniversary gift or something.” He still squirms in his seat but isn’t willing to elaborate, so I let the topic go. It couldn’t be that important and I’m not about to push him into being any more uncomfortable than he already is.

    We settle into a comfortable silence for a while as he works on his latest expose on the slow shrinking of cafeteria servings and how it goes back to inflation and I play around with the formatting of my letter from the editor and Kevin’s monthly gossip column.

I leave school feeling lighter than I did when I came in the morning but the weight of the note making my backpack feel a million times heavier.

    I mindlessly float through dinner with my parents and quickly finish my homework before I take residence on my bed and pulling out the slightly crumpled piece of paper that has been in my thoughts since it fell out of my locker this morning.

I read it through a few more times, trying to really direct it, discover any clue about its author before I give up and resolve myself to it remaining a mystery forever.

    Then a thought pops into my head. Of course I am having a hard time doing this by myself! I may have a disposition toward being a private investigator after I graduate college, but I work best when I have someone to bounce my ideas off of. I need someone detached from the whole situation. Someone who can take the clue for what it is: a clue. All of my hopelessly devoted friends would see it as an opportunity to set me up.

Except one.

Before I can talk myself out of it, I pull up my phone and open my messages app.

Betty: I need your help.

I wait rather impatiently for it to ding with the tell-tale signal of a response. Within the minute, the screen lights up with a new message.

Juggie: Whats up?

I carefully consider my words before landing on a decisive explanation.

Betty: I got an anonymous love letter in my locker this morning. I want to find its sender so that I can assess its sincerity.

The next response doesn’t come as quickly as the first, but it is clear he is carefully considering his words. I begin to regret asking him something so absurd when he sends something back.

Juggie: And I come in where…?

I breathe a sign of relief at his intrigue and send off four messages in rapid succession.

Betty: I can’t be objective in this situation.

Betty: And I work better when I work with you. Please!

Betty: Pretty please with a cherry on top!

Betty: I’ll treat you to Pop’s when we find him!

I guess the last promise does the trick because he agrees and we exchange a few back-and-forths about what I know so far and when we can discuss the next stages in our investigation.

    Before I know it, it is midnight and my usual sleep schedule that accommodates a full 8 hours is completely ruined. I note the time and my increasingly-frequent yawns and wish him good night before shutting my bedside lamp and drifting off with thoughts of my beanie-wearing bestie and my newly-realized secret admirer.

I arrive at school with a sugar-filled frozen coffee (that would cause my mother to faint if she knew) and a smile on my face with the gears turning for Project Not-So-Secret Admirer.

(Title in Progress.)

I arrive at my locker and take a cleansing breath before entering the combination and looking inside.

There lies another letter, this time accompanied by a beautiful, fresh gardenia.

To my Juliet,

I don’t doubt that you wish to find out my identity and my intentions.

Well, my identity will not be revealed for your own sake.

I do not wish to court you or have you on my arm. You do not need to be on anyone’s arm, for your strength and quiet power speaks above even the loudest of voices. I do not possess even a fraction of your intelligence or talent. Instead, I am willing to repress my feeling deep inside the prison of my mind because I lack the courage to even approach this subject with a woman like you. I could never burden you with the difficulties of my own life and I lack the means that you deserve to be provided. You have no need, of course, for someone to provide for you, but you deserve to be taken care of. Unfortunately, the person to do that is not me.

I guess that leaves the explanation of my intentions.

I have seen you deflate recently. You seem to carry a heavy burden on your shoulders and do not possess some of the courage and lightness that once made your eyes sparkle. Your radiance seems to be glaringly apparent to everyone but you.

With these letters, I wish to show you how you look through another pair of eyes. I see just how amazing you truly are and I wish to share my vision of the one and only Betty Cooper with you. I want that confidence to return and mirror the person it comes from.

I love you, Betty Cooper.

I just wish that you would love yourself as much as I do.

Always and forever yours, Your Romeo

[lighthouseofthewanderess]

Childhood

According to UNICEF: Childhood is the time for children to be in school and at play, to grow strong and confident with the love and encouragement of their family and an extended community of caring adults. It is a precious time in which children should live free from fear, safe from violence and protected from abuse and exploitation.

If it weren’t for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I would’ve made a movie about myself. The curious childhood for Priya Bala. My bestie from school, Uthra, always said that I grew up too fast. When others were doing silly stuff, I was being an adult. And the more adult I needed to be with time, the more childlike I got. I don’t particularly regret it; it was what I needed to be to survive each phase but lost years are still years. I was constantly out of sync, and learning to swim even before I sprouted feet.

I was in 4th grade when I found my mom in the kitchen past midnight. She was staring hard at the stove, in the burnt yellow glow of a zero watt bulb. When I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and looked at her from the shadows, she had a knife in her hand. My 10-year old body had a 20-year old mind. I walked up to her and took away the knife. As if the puzzle pieces didn’t need to fit for me to read the picture I took a deep breath and set into motion the next challenge in our life. “Mom, divorce him. We don’t need this dad.” Ok, maybe the phrasing of ‘this dad’ was like a 10-year old. But I meant the words. I knew this much that we had moved from US to Chennai only to give this marriage another shot. I also knew that there was no love in the house, just struggle to keep a broken bond from breaking further. It was unfortunate that she was given this man as her husband and more so that I was given this man as my father. If this was the person by relation we had to make ends meet with, well, we were better off alone. I had seen mom do a hundred super stuff and this was easily something she could brave. Till day my mom says, “You showed me a door when I thought I was all walled in.” And till today I’m really glad we both walked out through that door, hand-in-hand.

This was just one of the things that got stuffed deep down inside me. I wanted to cry, I wanted to show what I felt for my dad. I wanted another dad; I wished this hypothetical new dad would bring gifts from the places he visited on work like the other dads I knew. I wanted to be proud and show off both my parents. I didn’t want to be strong, I wanted someone else to take care of me. But I understood reality all too well, always have. Mom had me and I had her. I had pushed her in a direction and I would be a fool to not be there when she needed me the most. And so I became her pillar of strength. ‘You’re my amma’, she used to say. What she expected her mother to do, I did -- for the longest time in life. When our visa was about to expire, we decided to make  that a student visa. That meant mom had to write TOEFL and GRE. I made flashcards for mom and sat with her through the nights, helping her practice. When she was feeling sleepy, I would make tea and ethuse her with stories of how we’d earn our permanent residency. If I shut my eyes, I can remember the cold carpet, the spot by the window where she sat and the warm cup of tea I handed over to her. Life was wearing us down to the bone.

When we went grocery shopping, mom was torn between the life she wanted to give me and the what life she had to settle for the time being. She would see me gazing at the clothes section and would ask me if I wanted a new dress. Pretty pink. Trims. Satin sashes. I could count the number of outfits sitting in my wardrobe on my little fingers. More than ten was a luxury. Now’s not the time. And it wasn’t that I was simplistic. I yearned for more. Toys. Books. Underwear with bows. But I knew this part of life wasn’t meant for that. That time will come too, and when it does I will be able to relish it more because of being held away from it now. I shook my head and smiled at mom. I reassured her she gave me everything I needed and that she was a great mom. The look of relief that washed over her was more than enough for me. I think through these trying times, the only worry she had was if she was being everything I needed. Mother. Father. Friend. Family. She needed to be all that. And what she didn’t know was I had to be all that as well. She never voiced it, but I the only way this two-woman army was going to work was if she had a support system too.

I forwent all the childhood drama over sleepovers and best friends. Or better put, I stuffed all that emotion within me. If there was a get together of people, I instinctively found myself drawn to the adults and their conversations. Comic books. Pencil books. Sidewalk chalk. It felt trivial. I had seen the real world, and I got a headstart into fitting myself there faster. The first rule of doing this was building a wall around you to keep yourself safe. This was the only logical reason why adults didn’t act out of character. They didn’t process emotions like children because they never felt them in the first place. It stayed outside an invisible circle and I needed to do that. I remember the moment went my wall was built. I had gone to a jungle-themed arcade. There, someone was standing on an inverted bucket and pulling a hoop around them - bottom to top. And when they did, a huge balloon closed over the person. My wall wasn’t going to be made of bubble but doing that again and again, I could visualize my safety wall.

The next thing to be done was not say everything you meant. The defense system had to work both ways right? If you’re going to keep yourself safe from fires, you also have to not cause any back fires. I would count to ten, and calm myself down. If I still felt angry, I hit a wall. I pushed over things in my room and cleaned it up later. I did have my outbursts, especially over men, but they were over adult stuff mostly. Someone not showing up at grandpa’s funeral. People bullying a classmate because she was American-black. The 9-11 attack. I was so used to hanging around the adults and people older than me that things they considered as problems were the ones I classified as problems too. In doing this I ignored clear indicators that were problems for my age. Abuse. Bullying. Anxiety. Neglect.

In my eyes, I was already an adult. And I was pretty sure life only got harder, my problems were peanut-sized. The shit was yet to come. How wonderfully wrong I was. When I hit 18, I mentally prepared myself for the real world to hit me with its biggest punch; it just didn’t come. I spent 3 years waiting before I realized that the hard times were already over and I had sailed straight through it because I was rock-hard inside. Then I learned to finally let go. Cotton candy. Elaborate sleepovers. Balloons on birthdays. There was this landmark moment where I discovered what a bobble head was. It was stuck onto the dashboard of someone’s car and I just couldn’t stop myself from poking it and giggling. I did that for almost an hour and everyone around me found it kiddish. It didn’t feel odd to me at all. In fact, I felt that I had earned my pass to childhood now, not then. Yes, earned. Not something you take for granted, but something you look forward to for good behavior. I bought dominoes just to set them off, collapsing over each other. While cooking I let things get messy, my hands dripping of brownie mix. I did ballet in the bathroom, slipped and fell. I made my mistakes, I bawled my eyes out over boys. It still was painful but not as painful as I remember my early years to be.

Luckily, I had the eyes to pick out other Benjamins. Those with young bodies and old souls. With them I could strike deep conversations and feel at home. Neha Kriplani was one of those. Together we fretted over our little stomach bulges, but we also stressed over the meaning of life. The importance of gratitude. The slightly complex books that were like bibles to decipher what life had dished out to us earlier. We shared the need to be understood, accepted yet try and do the normal things. Sometimes we stepped into things that were exciting for other people our age and found that a night in over some chick flicks was good enough. Give us bottle of Glenfiddich and a coloring book - we’d spend hours in silence still building that bond we had. Trauma, I found, had this immense power to make you stronger and age you within. It gave you the option to switch between two parallel lives in the same timeframe; a blissful chameleon effect. It widened our outlook and removed the glittery filter over the world. We saw it for what it was and we said ‘Bring it on, I’ve seen worse.’ Trauma brought people together, in ways that therapists wished they could.

Till today when I find myself really low that’s the same thing I say to myself. You’ve been through much worse, this too shall pass. And when you have a dialogue like that with life, you only come out stronger. So did I really miss out on childhood? Maybe not. If the phrase ‘there’s a child in all of us’ stays true, then it also holds true that we’re always living our childhood. It’s just lucky for some to have done adulthood first. Because now we have the spending power and freedom to gift ourselves things we always wanted as kids. That had more value than powering through the early years, half not remembering most of it, painting a pretty picture of life and finding out the bitter truth when you’re all ready to conquer the world. I see kids today living out their childhood with glazed eyes and think to myself ‘they have no idea what’s going to come their way.’ That innocence is bliss, but it only saves you for one quarter of life. I don’t want to burst their bubble and tell them ‘Hey, you need a fortress not this bubble shit.’ But then again, how life tells them that is their story. Not mine. Here’s my definition of childhood: the few years in your life where you’re lucky if you’re surrounded with a family, truckloads of love, and a safe space to find yourself. If not, then it might as well be an army boot camp but you’ll turn out fine, soldier.