The end and the beginning

After four years of the ever-cliched blood sweat and tears, a chapter came to a close.

Hours were spent in the basement of a university academic building -- our office -- where our words, our pictures, our thoughts, our ideas came to life before our very eyes. We were the newspaper and we were a family.

In our basement home, with carpet stained from years of spilled cokes that were purchased to keep drowsy editors awake, with painted white pipes jutting from the ceiling that we were always afraid were going to burst, with those crazy geometric shapes in orange and brown painted on the walls many years before our being there, with the tattered yellow couch that we all took naps on-- we spent so many hours in that basement office.

We were a family -- a loving, crazy, eclectic family. We spent years getting to know one another. We loved, we fought, we yelled, we cursed, we praised, we laughed, we sang, and sometimes, we even got some work done.

We were all so different, but we had one thing in common: we loved that damn newspaper. I got to know some of those people better than roommates, better than folks who lived on the same floor of my apartment, better than the people I sat next to in class.

Week after week we came to that basement office, with the musty smell hanging in the air and a thermastat that never seemed to work. Week after week we came back so that we could spend hours in front of a computer screen. We would've gone crazy had it not been for one another --and for the jokes, the laughter, the singing and the dancing that would break the tension on those long nights.

And on that last night, the sounds of U2 filled the room. I thought it wouldn't be so hard to say goodbye. But I was wrong.

And I sank into the tattered yellow couch and cried.