“[S]ometimes life doesn’t afford proper goodbyes.” That was one of the thoughts Lindsay Mills shared on her blog after her boyfriend Edward Snowden exposed the potentially (kinda definitely) illegal surveillance of Americans by the NSA and fled their home for Hong Kong where he waits to see what will happen to him.

The 28-year-old Mills’s relationship with Snowden (to whom she refers on her blog as her “man of mystery”) brings the monumental whistleblowing story even closer to home for Baltimoreans. A dancer, Mills is a graduate of MICA and the two lived just south of the city for a while.