I try to have crushes, because it’s one thing I’ve always done without much prompting, and if my most recent breakup shut me down, then what better than infatuation to open me back up. I don’t care if I get burned. In fact it might be better that way.

I rehash all the things I told myself when Nick and I started going out. I thought then that I was enlightened, that all my previous pain was acceptable because it helped me get to that precious present moment. Nick was very practical. When I had problems with my parents—which I wasn’t supposed to have because I was enlightened, but which I did, because I always did, and because I was a teenager and they still treated me like I was twelve—we approached it in very rational, spiritually advanced ways. I wasn’t supposed to get mad, or let it bother me much or dare dwell on it, Nick kept reminding me.

I worked on books my parents gave me for Christmas like Taste Berries for Teens and Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens, kept a notebook for each to work on myself to be better, to be able to be better loved.

When I look back, I hate who I’ve become after all that enlightenment. I want to throw that away into the Chester River and take back myself, who I was before Nick, even if that girl was in a lot of pain. I want to take back my dreams, my rawness.

~~~

This is an excerpt from Moonchild. Since I’m going to be working diligently on rewriting and revising that project (read about that mess of a task here), I’ll probably be posting excerpts from Moonchild for awhile.

This excerpt takes place during the fall of my freshman year. I was struggling big-time with writer’s block, and was at the school on a writing scholarship, so that was a bit of a dilemma.

Don’t forget to check out Samples, Published and Early Work for more excerpts and chapters and full pieces of writing.

~EJ