Journalists learn quickly that every story has a word count. Features are 1,200 words, columns are 400 and captions 25. But when it comes time to quantify 12 years of growth, friendship, failure and triumph, these limits dissolve into meaninglessness, like trying to measure the ocean with a teaspoon or capture a symphony with a single note.
In the ReMarker style guide, we have precise formulas for everything. Headlines should be clear, concise and always with a subject and a verb. Numbers 10 and over are presented in numerical form, those under are written out. Attributions for quotations come before a person’s name, not after. We interview, we write, we condense, we edit on such a routine basis it has become ingrained into each and every one of us.
Yet as I prepare to leave St. Mark’s after 12 years, I find myself struggling with the limitations of this repeated routine. Nowhere in our style guide is the language of goodbye.
When I started here as a first-grader, my vocabulary consisted of perhaps 2,500 words. Now, as I graduate, linguistics research suggests I know approximately 30,000. Yet even with this expanded lexicon, words feel insufficient. They stack up like building blocks that never quite reach high enough to see the full landscape of what this school has meant.
Yet AP English Literature taught me that constraints breed creativity—that sonnets excel precisely because they must fit 14 lines, that haikus distill entire worlds into seventeen syllables. Maybe the impossibility of saying everything is the point.
The stories that found me at St. Mark’s weren’t just the ones I reported. They were the friendships I forged with classmates at every turn—in new classes, on new teams. The mentors who saw potential I couldn’t yet recognize. The injuries, the setbacks, the failures that taught more than successes ever could.
These narratives don’t fit neatly into columns. They spill over margins, ignore deadlines, and refuse to be summarized in snappy headlines. They’re not written on laptops and displayed in newsprint, not edited for style errors, but grown and molded by time and reflection.
With every story we write for the paper, we seek to answer the most essential question at the heart of every topic, issue and experience. Perhaps the question I find myself answering here is simple: How do you say goodbye to a place that has shaped nearly every aspect of who you are?
The answer might be even simpler. You don’t. Maybe you recognize that some stories continue beyond their final paragraph—that the influences of this community, these people, this education will reverberate through chapters still unwritten.
If I’ve learned anything from 12 years at St. Mark’s and the three I have spent on the ReMarker, it’s that the most profound truths often emerge from what’s left unsaid—from the white space between paragraphs, the silence between quotes, the moments between milestones.
So as I reach my self-imposed word limit for this final column, I find myself realizing that some stories simply refuse to end.
The newspaper teaches us to work within constraints. Life teaches us to recognize when to break them.
