Fast Eddie

Ed Mazurek messaged me today over facebook chat.

Three years after the fact, I'm pretty sure he's the coolest person I've ever dated. He gave himself the nickname Fast Eddie, made rambling keyboard music under the tome Gargoyles Benedict, and his senior yearbook quote? "Tu es la vague, je suis l'ile nu," a Serge Gainsbourg lyric that translates to "You are the wave, I am the naked island." Swoon.

I remember driving around with him in his car listening to L'Histoire de Melody Nelson trying to find a Walmart down the shore. It took us over an hour after getting lost, but once we got there, we stole My Little Ponys. I still have the remnants of the packaging on my wall at home...along with song lyrics he wrote for me, and a picture I drew of us. After the purloined ponys, we ended up back at his Grandfather's bed and breakfast on 10th and Central, sneaking into a basement apartment to fool around. I was sunburned. We both were clumsy. My father kept calling me, but I repeatedly ignored my cellphone. He was furious. He picked me up on the corner before Ed and I could consummate anything, and it took us four hours to get home in traffic.

I believe that was the last time I saw Ed under the pretense of this summer relationship we had going. He stopped talking to me, I was hurt, and he went off to Williams in the fall. Later on, he'd sporadically contact me, saying how sore he felt over the way things ended. How he was confused and didn't know what to do, and felt things were getting too serious before college. He told me he'd like to get to know me again under a different context, but it never happened. While I was dating Matt Campanella, and was unsure of the whole thing (which, honestly, I had every right to be because Matt was pretty damned toxic), Ed told me that the best way to judge if you should be in a relationship with someone is if you could watch a Discovery Channel special about dolphins with them and enjoy it. To just lay there and cuddle and watch dolphins. I don't think Ed and I ever got to that point while we were together. Just a bunch of teenage touching and trying to impress one another.

He messaged me today asking what I thought of "Moon," and we had a coherent critical conversation for about three minutes before he started rambling on about what it would be like to talk to one's clone. He then told me that at this point, he's decided he wants to be a filmmaker, and he saw his first Woody Allen film this past week. "Hannah and Her Sisters." I told him "Manhattan" was my favorite.

He's working at the Vox Populi this summer, which is incredibly sexy, and part of me wishes I stayed in Philadelphia for the break, just so I could have gone to that record launch party he had there the other night. But I'm in New York, and I still doubt we could ever watch the dolphins together after all these years.