prozacchickOG 2002

A Long Island girl whose favorite place in the world was New Jersey — specifically wherever a guy named Ty happened to be — Kimberly Marzocco arrived on eZabel in February 2002 and immediately established herself as the friend who texts you seventeen times in a row, each message more urgent than the last, and somehow makes you love her for it. Her writing style was a breathless cascade of exclamation points, "haha"s, and phonetic spellings that read like someone talking so fast her fingers couldn't keep up. She homeschooled through high school, worked for her dad doing "typin and paperwork crap," regular pioneered, and considered the whole arrangement superior to any traditional job — "beats all." She was the person who got a new Nokia phone for free by convincing the company their reception was terrible ("i told them there company better not be THAT bad!"), who drove five hours through snow and sleet to see g.f.s.rocks's band play and ended up at "some hicks backyard" getting beaten by a five-year-old five times her size, and who still declared the whole thing worth it. Her first comment on the site was "im gonna cry" — directed at magnum, who she accused of enjoying her suffering — and their dynamic never really changed. Joe teased her relentlessly, threatened to post her poetry publicly, called her friends weird, and she kept coming back for more, once begging him in all caps to please, please not share what she'd written: "u can hate me and been mean to me all u want and i wont annoy u for it...please!!!"

Kim ran with the tight-knit crew that orbited the NJ-to-Long-Island social axis. tesoro was her ride-or-die — the cousin-or-not-cousin (nobody ever got a straight answer), the person she called first about boy drama, the one she woke up with at the same hour as her boyfriend and couldn't explain why. punkprincess was the late-night confidante who got the serialized, multi-message saga every time Ty did something confusing — the calls, the emails, the rules about when to call back, the cold voicemails, all of it delivered in real-time installments like a soap opera you couldn't turn off. She loved writing poetry — genuinely good stuff, according to Joe and bwp, who lamented that her reluctance to share it made "the world a lesser place" — and she kept two notebooks: a daily planner and a private journal she said she'd die if she lost. "I love that it cant talk back," she wrote about her journal, and magnum immediately replied hoping it couldn't talk at all. She wanted kids someday (her boyfriend didn't), loved flip flops so much she'd sneak them into work on days her boss was out, dreamed of surfing and tanning and boating through her first jobless summer since fifteen, and wrote about all of it with an emotional transparency that made everything feel like it was happening right now, to you, and wasn't it exciting?

eZabel Personality Type: ESFP — "The Open Book." She burned bright and brief — 91 of her 94 comments landed in 2002 alone, with only a handful trailing into September 2003, her last being a bittersweet observation about how bad memories ruin good songs forever. Kim was pure unfiltered energy while she was here: loud, loving, dramatic about everything from phone reception to boy trouble, and incapable of writing a single sentence that didn't somehow make you smile.