> tapioca world tour

I have no idea where Eric Klingelhofer is or what he’s doing right now, but his name alone reminds me of running circles around the pond at midnight in the rain, listening to an old mix tape of Seal and R. Kelly and TLC. I was seventeen, a straight-edged art geek from poor Philly suburbs and I hated Newburyport and I hated high school.

He was sixteen and hated high school. So much, in fact, that he left to go to a different one. I’m convinced I knew him at the wrong time — we should have met as adults instead. Maybe the time hasn’t even come yet: someday he’ll be an ambassador and I’ll be a prize-winning filmmaker and we’ll attend the same UN event in Geneva and it won’t be until I sit across from him for the panel discussion that I’ll realize, holy shit, that’s Eric Klingelhofer, whom I was totally in love with junior year. But I’ll be too busy answering questions from the enraptured audience to give it too much thought, and he’ll never recognize me because I’ll have perfect teeth and wider hips and be wearing high-heeled boots under a suede skirt, and, as we all know, the girl he knew from high school would never in a million years end up looking like that.

Ah, fond retribution!
Thank God for the passage of time. In that vein: happy birthday, Eric.