The Continuing Adventures of Eco Boy vs. Yoga Girl.

“The below is an excerpt of a forthcoming novella. It’s autobiographical fiction (with the emphasis on fiction). Book forthcoming in Spring 2012, the first from elephant journal press.”

“The most direct way to destroy an altruistic human being is to threaten their ability to be good. These humans are creatures not driven by money or sex or candy or any sweet thing. These humans are creatures driven by joy and pain—inspiration and empathy. Threaten these human’s ability to be of benefit—and you take away their reason to live.” ~ Dr. Willard Evans

He’d caught Him.

Wasn’t sure if it was God Himself, or just the magical elves who were responsible for forming him out of clay back in the day, but he’d woken up this morning and He or they’d forgotten to put his face back together. It was a big amorphous lump with a few eyes set clumsily in the middle of it, like a snowman out of Calvin & Hobbes.

He’d been working the night before, until late—3, 4 am—as he’d done most nights for 8 months straight since She Who Must Not Be Named had moved out. Somehow, naively, he figured that working all the time kept him safe. Not sure of the logic on that—but it was better than going out and dating and being paranoid he’d run into She, or, more likely, she’d run into him. “I’m not traumatized, he explained jocularly one morning to his barista, when said barista’d asked him about She—”‘traumatized’ implies it’s my issue. It’s more like PTSD.”

He was staring at his playdough face in the mirror, about to shower (hoping his face would reform into the Eco Boy he knew and loved) when his home’s doorbell rang. He froze, as if he’d been tazed.

It was just the Fed Ex lady, though, the one who loved Blue, his dog, and she had two packages for Eco Boy and one treat for the pooch. But his body’s visceral, inadvertent reaction was enough to let him know the sad truth: 9 months after She Who Must Not Be Named, he was walking on tip toes, walking on egg shells, afraid, tense, scared.

Man up, a friend had told him, lovingly. Stand tall and take a deep breath. It was good advice, and wholly naive.

There’s only one cure for an Onslaught of Crazy, a Siege of Psycho: and in Eco Boy’s case, he didn’t know what that cure was. He was fcuked.

But he did have a faint image in his mind, and she was that stranger in that cafe, the one with the too-big black yoga mat…and in his PTSD-reverie, standing with amorphous face in front of his front door with two packages in hand and a happy munching dog and the door open to the cold world, wrapped in a huge white yellow green red vintage striped blanket—that cure was naked.