Electric Eel - Blue Crush

I’ll never forget that first time I saw him. He was standing outside of our dorms in his electric blue, oversized ski coat, sucking down a cigarette, kicking at the snow with his tattered adidas. My reaction was animalistic. As I walked a wide circle around him, waiting to catch a glimpse of his face, his eyes came up to meet mine. The electric blue of his eyes to rival the brightness of his ski apparel, were offset by the opaque pale of his skin and his hair.

The butterflies were begging to push from my stomach up and out my lips when I walked into our newest class on Logic. Who was seated across from the door, next to an empty chair? None other than my pale, blue-eyed crush. What were the odds, it hardly seemed logical at all. It felt like fate to me, like a spiritual pull towards the tractor beams in his glowing blue eyes.

I tripped over myself a bit, blushing ear to ear as I moved, unsubtle to be sure, to sit by his side. The aroma of his pheromones taking over my logical mind, I smiled a coyly out one side of my lips as the teacher opened our first class on Logic. What is so logical, tell me, about meeting one of your soul mates in a semester long class about mental puzzles and correct answers?

The odds of us being drawn together like two moths to a smoldering flame felt unavoidable. The heat of his presence nearly made me go insane. We became closer, and closer each day. Seeing him leaving or entering class I would walk my bike next to his loping stride trying to instigate a connection beyond classmates.

From time to time I remember catching a glimpse of his unmistakable countenance across the quad. I would count the seconds until we could collide, I always directed my course in such a way to casually intercept his own determined direction. He would invariably great me with a warm side hug and tell me some kind of a nerdy joke about particles or logic puzzles.

My young college-girl confidence disabled me in his presence. We began to hang out with each other on a near daily basis, yet I never found the courage to tell him how his mere presence would send me into the stratosphere of my mind.

Following study sessions, working logic puzzles in the library, my electric blue crush would drive me in his little, silver beat-up hot-rod mobile to hang at one of his friends houses. Of course, he knew cool upper class kids who seemed to do nothing but sit around and get high. They were big into drugs and I am sober yet my crush was intelligent enough to hold both realities in his brain simultaneously while smoking weed laced with cocaine.

If my logic daydream’s drug habit weren’t just the red flag I needed, then his girlfriend should have been. Half-way through our semester together, I went on a trip for spring break, and when I got back my own electric crush was wrapped up in a toxic love connection of his own making with a wild, untamed girl. Sometime that year she streaked through the cafeteria and got expelled, yet she kept hanging out around town as if to torture us.

For whatever reason I didn’t heed the massive red flags, nor did I create boundaries to protect my feelings. He and I still shared so much of our time together, on campus and off. Even when our semester ended and we no longer had an excuse.

Almost in spite of our friendship, I took on a boyfriend of my own. When that didn’t last I allowed an older guy from my home town to woo me until I felt like I had really re-fallen in love.

My electric blue eel like, fair haired, vampiric crush and I continued to be unlikely friends.

One time, on the way to get Thai food at our favorite, hole-in-the-wall lunch spot, he told me that he respected me too much to want to be my boyfriend. Again with the red flags. He went on to say that he could count on one hand the amount of people who he respected in this life, he didn’t want to ruin it by committing to me romantically. In some kind of a warped way I took that excuse as a compliment, replacing my daydream of him holding me for the delicious egg rolls we were about to eat. I wanted him in my life so badly that I was willing to settle for best friend.

The more time went by, the more I just wanted to fill the cracks in his soul with the immense love I’d had for him since that very first day I saw him outside in the snow, smoking a cigarette, drawing me in like a gravitational centrifuge into the desert of his soul.

Overtime we spent less and less of it together. As we drifted, I would find myself wandering between classes near the electrical engineering school where he was completing his major. I ate lunch over there and found excuses to visit his building, which wasn’t hard, his building was opposite mine and adjacent to the student center.

As if in a mirage, sometimes I would see his vampire like white countenance coming out of the double doors towards me. Sometimes it was him, sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes we stood in that same doorway and kicked at imaginary dirt on the floor to avoid embracing each other. Sometimes he gave me that warm yet awkward side hug, said he’d call me, and never did. It didn’t matter anyway, we were both in different connections with vastly different kinds of people.

I saw him once a few years after graduation, invited him up to the mountain house where I was living. He said something obscure about how I wouldn’t want him for a boyfriend anyway, that he was too possessive. We spent an amazing night together and then he left. Our connection wasn’t sustainable, that’s for sure. That kind of fire will burn you up inside.

We were too damaged.

I wrote him a poem, back in the days of our logic co-ed companionship:

‘Tractor Beams

In Your Eyes

Drag me in like

A gravitational

Centrifuge

Into Which

I fall in after you

Your Attraction

Inexplicable

Your Distraction

Irremissibly painful

And the way you treat me

Disdainful’

Ouch. All the feels.

If there’s one that got away, it’s my electric-blue vampire eel.