Oh God, how do I start this? I love you, Peak, and I will always love you.
It’s not you, it’s the SFSS elections. I can’t live tweet my way through another set of six hour-long debates. It’s the beautiful nightmares about writing formulaic articles on SFU’s community engagement. At the heart of it, it’s about how I’ve changed.
I gave you the best years of my undergraduate degree, and you gave me prematurely grey eyebrow hairs and an addiction to lukewarm Folgers coffee. Really, you’re the habit I have to kick.
I’ve been carrying a voice recorder in my bag and a chip on my shoulder for too long.
We’ve made some beautiful memories together — late nights in the office drinking too much vanilla Coke, Sting-a-longs to acoustic renditions of “Message in a Bottle,” and travelling to exotic places like downtown Edmonton, or making the trek down to the SFU Security office in Discovery 1.
Like Cathy and Heathcliff, the two of us are inextricable. From the bowels of Burnaby Mountain I cry out, “I am The Peak!”
I worry that I will lose all of my friends to you when I leave. After all, you are the biggest thing we have in common. I do concede that you can have them on Fridays. Just try not to keep the poor dears out too late, slaving away to fill your pages.
“I’ll still write,” I say. “I’ll stay on as collective rep on the board of directors,” I said. I think we both know that might not be entirely realistic.
“Make it a clean break,” said noted advice-giver, and my mother, Joanne. I know I should probably listen to her, but I don’t know if I can really quit you.
No, there’s no one else. Not yet. But I’ll have to pay the bills somehow. I’m just looking for something different — something that won’t swallow me whole. I can’t forever be at the beck and call of campus news.
Is there a life for me after student journalism? Nothing is for certain, but I have to find out.
