I met my girlfriend through Orphan Black.
Every comment I receive on my fanfiction is special to me, but one in particular will always hold more weight than the others.
In mid-October, after I posted Chapter 4 of my Foreign Bodies fic on Tumblr, I received the following comment: “This is incredible. I really adore your writing style. Thank you.”
Good grammar, flattery, and thanks—how could a writer resist?
I let it sit overnight, smiling every now and then as it popped in and out of my mind. The next morning, clear-headed, I responded. Thank goodness I responded.
What followed were months of talking back and forth. First Tumblr messages, then emails, then texts, and finally our first phone call, which lasted five hours. There was one Skype session but it was completely nerve-wracking, possibly quite awkward, and rarely discussed.
My job allowed me to work remotely from New York, and her job in Nashville had her taking night shifts. So our days were spent bouncing between modes of communication, making light of the day-to-day mundaneness, and telling old stories for new ears. There was so much to learn, so much to like.
By December, she’d booked a trip to visit me in January. The romance of being far away was starting to wear off. We just wanted to see each other. Now all we had to do was wait—the torture!
We filled the time by creating art for each other. As a musician, she wrote songs for me. As a writer, I wrote fanfiction for her, some AU fantasies in which we actually lived closer. After all, it’s the writing that brought us together in the first place.
One thousand years (one month) later, she finally arrived in New York. Two seconds (five days) later, she was headed back to Nashville. What now?
We were both at transitional points in our lives, starting new jobs and not knowing where to put ourselves. Back in our separate cities, communication became painful; distance felt impossible. And we soon realized that in order to give “us” a chance, we needed to be in the same place.
By the end of January, she picked up and moved to New York. We quickly cobbled together our own little life in my tiny Lower East Side studio, supporting each other through new career paths and artistic pursuits, all the while counting down the days to season 2.
And just to tie this craziness in a bow, the other week (after we got back from seeing the five-tiered Orphan Black billboard in Times Square), I went on Tumblr (naturally), and saw that there is going to be a special, fan screening of the season 2 premiere at the Sunshine Cinema in downtown New York—the Sunshine Cinema that happens to be five blocks from the apartment we now share.
Fact: Hiatuses suck. But never underestimate what can happen between seasons.