THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

 

The SAM that began Volume 40 imagined themselves to be militant, strong, and unbreakable. Stalwart with the force of thirty years of history. An emergent state ready for any state of emergency. 

 

Twelve weeks later, our world has changed. We have held fast to our military metaphors despite their inadequacy, moving all officer communications online, reducing our printing capacity to a tenth of normal production, and operating a subscription service out of our living rooms, each address carefully transcribed in morse code. 

 

We desperately miss the physical spaces that we used to believe defined the Indy. We thought our paper was Conmag on Wednesday nights: DumDum wrappers and printer cords under harsh fluorescent lights, writers and editors hunched together over one laptop. Because we have known the Indy through physical closeness, negotiating new distances has felt especially difficult. 

 

Yet we’ve learned that the Indy is also eight-hour Zoom calls, handwritten manila envelopes, and the intimacy of editing simultaneously on a Google doc. The weekly rhythms of the Indy will return; with new hands at the reins, new voices through the fog. For now, writing together has never felt more crucial, more sustaining, more necessary. 

 

when we are apart, we are not alone