Our Bleeding Heart for UON Love Letters
It’s one heartbreaking tragedy after the next as UON Love Letters goes MIA. Keighley Bradford reminisces about the good old days of anonymous confessions.
First, they came for the mirror ball, then they came for UON Love Letters.
Okay, so I am being a tad overdramatic, but can you blame me? Earlier this week it was revealed that UON’s beloved mirror ball at Auchmuty Library had been stolen and is yet to be recovered. And then, in my attempt to feel better and lift my spirits following this tragedy, I find out that a key part of the UON Community – nay, a key part of every UON student’s life – has also disappeared off the face of the earth.
Seriously WTF is going on? Are people intentionally trying to make 2020 worse?
UON Love Letters has been a core part of the (unofficial and online) UON Community for years – certainly since well before I arrived on the scene in mid-2016. The Facebook Page was all anyone could talk about. It was where we confessed to our crushes that we liked them. It was where we shouted out strangers and food outlets for a job well done. Hell, even Yak joined in on the fun, collaborating with the page to bring you our best (okay, fine, second-best) April Fool’s joke earlier this year.
UON Love Letters meant different things to each of us. To my friend, it was where she found out someone in a club she was involved with liked her. For my fellow Yaks, it was where a student showed their appreciation of our fundraising efforts and ‘mad taste in music’. For me, it was an inspiration of new form storytelling, a place where I found the courage to venture out of my comfort zone by writing my first romance novel.
UON Love Letters was a place of hope for us lonely souls who dreamed of a book-worthy meet-cute. It was a place of desire for us longing souls too afraid to open up our heart in person for fear of rejection. It was a place of reprieve for us wearisome souls in need of some temporary relief from uni and life’s’ woes.
But mostly, at its core, UON Love Letters was a place where each and every one of us felt connected. If you met a student who didn’t know what you were going on about, you sure as hell made sure they did before you left them. It was this community that loved to dream and have a laugh, that was always welcoming to every soul who reached out to them. Honestly, I’m not quite sure how many of us are going to survive this devastation without always reminiscing of the good old days.
I think it’s safe to say, to many of us it feels like a gaping hole has been left in our community’s heart following these incidents, and honestly, any hope we’ll ever know what happened seems dismal at best.
To our friends at the OG UON Love Letters, if you’re reading this, thank you for providing us with love and laughter for all these years. We’re sad to see you go and wished we had the chance to say goodbye, but you’ll forever hold a special place in our hearts.
Feature Image by freestocks.org from Pexels, no changes made
Disclaimer: we have not been able to establish when the page disappeared, however, the last post appears to be about two months ago.
[…] based on a quintessential university experience – anonymous online love letters. Joining the ‘UON Love Letters’ Facebook page as a student, Keighley was intrigued by the phenomenon, seeing it as an ideal […]