Harriet wrote like the sea had taken a bite out of her and never gave it back.
She waited for a man who left with a promise and didn’t return with a body. Just silence. Long enough that people stopped asking, long enough that she forgot how to speak his name without choking on it.
She doesn’t beg him to come back.
She just wants to know if he meant it.
If he drowned, or if he chose to vanish.
“I still wonder,” she writes, “did you drown?”
And that’s the part that ruined me. Not that he left;
but that she’d have loved him anyway.
I wrote it down so I could let it go,
— Elsie Thorne
The sea gave it back. But the dead don’t read.
This letter was physically found in Barrie, Ontario > May 2025.
Little Ghost Post 