flipflop_diva

I have four best friends. None of them live anywhere near me. One of them I’ve never even met in person. But we spend time together almost every day. They know everything about me — probably more than most of my other friends and family members, even the ones I see in person sort of regularly.

They know the parts of me I keep hidden from other people, the parts I worry would get judged or shamed, the parts you don’t always talk about out in the real world. They know all the good stuff and all the bad stuff, and they are still here. Every day.

I’ve had other best friends before, but these four are different. These are the four who get me, who understand me, who love me no matter what — and I hope I do the same for them.

But sometimes, I look back on the road to meeting them and I marvel at what it took. All the moments that didn’t mean much when they happened, but that ended up leading me to them.

A broken road in a way, filled with detours and potholes. A type of road that only someone as hardy as an opossum would navigate to get to the good stuff in the end.

A story that has a lot of firsts. And a story that starts a long, long time ago.

-

This story, for all intents and purposes, starts the first time I used a computer. I was in elementary school. One day a week, our class walked down the halls to the little room full of Apple computers that kids born today would barely recognize as a computer. We’d all sit in front of our very own machine and try not to die from dysentery on the Oregon Trail. Thirty minutes later, we’d get up and head back to our classroom.

It was fun. Not as fun as killing space invaders or chasing Pac-Man on my dad’s Atari, but it was a good time.

Life-changing? Well, I was in elementary school. That phrase didn’t mean much back then.

--

The first time I connected to the internet I was in high school. My mom, my sister and I stood around my dad’s desk in his makeshift home office and watched as he pressed some buttons, and a loud dialing noise filled the room.

“We are connected!” my dad said proudly once the dialing noise stopped.

We all cheered. In truth, I had no idea what it meant, beyond the fact that we could now send mail through the computer instead of by hand. That seemed cool, but life-changing?

Well, I didn’t have piles and piles of stationary and sparkly pens for nothing.

--

The first time I read fanfic I was in grad school. It was late one night, and I was procrastinating on my homework, trying to find spoilers on “Days of Our Lives” instead of researching Boston politics for a story I needed to write for one of my journalism classes. After all, I’d been watching “Days” since I was fourteen years old, and some things I just needed to know before I could go back to serious things.

I ended up on a couple websites I’d never been to before, and then I saw something that made me pause.

It wasn’t a spoiler or even anything about upcoming or current storylines. Instead, it was like a scene from a story, posted there for everyone to see.

I read it, then read more, than stared transfixed at the most graphic description of a sexual encounter I’d ever read.

I clicked off the site, logged off the internet, feeling a weird sense of curiosity and shame. I had no idea what I had found, but it hadn’t been anything like I expected.

The next day I couldn’t resist. I tried my best to find that same site again, to re-read the same stories. I didn’t find those, but I found other ones, and I started to read them. All of them.

I didn’t tell anyone what I found. I didn’t try to figure out what it was. Not then. But I kept coming back, kept finding more, kept reading them, until I couldn’t find any more.

I thought that was the end of it — the stories, my short-term obsession. A blip in time. Little did I know it wasn’t the end at all.

--

The first time I left a comment on a fanfic was also the day I first started to write my own. It was the spring of 2006, and I was obsessed with “Grey’s Anatomy,” but mostly with a certain red-haired doctor and her ass of an ex-husband. I had rarely ever wanted two characters together so much in my life, and I read fic after fic after fic of them.

Until I got to one that was written so well and felt so real, it was better than any book I’d read in years. It made me want to start writing the idea that was in my head instead of just thinking about it.

It also made me want to tell the author how much I loved their story.

So I made an account, on this little site called LiveJournal, and I posted a comment. And then I opened a Word document and began to write.
A couple weeks later, I posted the first chapter of the fic I was working on. I waited for hours, nervous, wondering if anyone would like it, wondering if anyone would read it. And then I got my first comment — a very nice comment — and I knew I had found a new hobby.

--

The first time I made a friend online was a few months after I posted my own first fanfic. The comm where I first read that amazing fic and left my very first comment hosted a friending meme.

Her name was Ashley, my first Internet friend. She loved “Grey’s Anatomy” and Addison and Derek as much as I did. We talked for hours about them and about fics we’d read and about ones we thought should exist but didn’t. And over time, we talked about other things too — real names and families and lives.

I’d heard all the stories about meeting people online — about how you should never use your real name, you should never tell them about your real life, how you needed to be careful because the person you were talking to probably wasn’t the person you thought they were — but meeting Ashley showed me that there was just as much good, maybe more, that could come from an online friendship as there was bad. And I wasn’t afraid to make more friends.

--

The first time …

Actually no.

This is the part of the story where, although there were so many more first times, I don’t really recall them. At the time, they were just ordinary events, everyday moments.

I don’t remember the first time I met any of my four now best friends. I don’t remember the first time we interacted or what we talked about.

We were all part of a Harry Potter community on LiveJournal, all four of us Hufflepuffs. I was the first one to join. They all came later.

I’m sure the first conversation we had was a “Welcome to the community,” but I can’t be sure.

The Hufflepuffs had a chat, originally on AIM and then on Chatzy. I don’t remember the first time I joined it, but I remember one day I was in chat with three of my four now best friends and it was as normal as breathing.

We have our own chats now, on Chatzy and in WhatsApp. We meet there every day. We keep each other productive and motivated while we do our work. Sometimes we keep each other productive and motivated while we do things like clean the kitchen and fold piles of laundry.

We also talk about everything — the shows we love, the characters we love, the foods we love, the things we love, the people we love. Some of us write fic. Some of us make graphics. Some of us binge “Forensic Files” on a daily basis.

We don’t hold anything back — not the silly things, like Wordle scores or dinner plans, and not the serious things, like mental health issues or worries about our kids. Any time I need them, I know they’ll be there, even if they can’t actually be here in person.

I love them, all four of them. I don’t know what I’d do without any of them. I hope I don’t have to find out.

It has been a crazy, twisting road to find them, to get to this point. Not nearly as simple as meeting someone on the first day of kindergarten or sharing a dorm room with them in college or meeting them on the first day of work.

It took a lot of firsts and a lot of decisions and a lot of venturing into things I wasn’t sure other people would understand.

But find them I did, through all the decisions I didn’t think much about and all the other ones I fretted over, each one more life-changing than I could possibly have known at the time, and each one I am so, so grateful for now, smutty fanfic and all.





Non-fiction.
This prompt was really tricky, since it's the line of a song. But I interpreted it as finding someone who knows all of you, even the smelly and yucky parts, and thinks it's the best thing ever. Or at least, that was my starting point!



This was written for therealljidol Three Strikes Mini Season. If you liked my entry, please consider voting for me! You should also go read all the other amazing entries. You can find them all here. Voting should be up Sunday night!