Sealed. Whatever you wrote is waiting.
15,887 secrets in the night right now
Secrets rise
into the night
Catch a stranger's secret out of the dark and read it. Leave a candle if it stays with you. Write one of your own when you are ready — anonymously, with no account, no name and no profile attached to it.
Tonight, somewhere
Someone has already written it down
Every secret here was written by a person who had nowhere else to put it. No name, no profile and no account is attached to it. Read one, hold a candle for it, and let it go.
My wife thinks I quit smoking in 2011. I did, in the house, in the car, everywhere she might smell it. But once a month I drive to a lookout an hour away, smoke exactly one cigarette, and watch the lights come on across the valley. It isn't the nicotine. It's the fifteen minutes of being a man accountable to no one, the last small room where I answer to nobody, and then I drive home and am hers again.— a stranger, somewhere
Widowed is what my grandmother called herself for sixty years. Abandoned is what she was. In 1953 she paid for a headstone with no body under it so her children could visit a grave instead of a question. I found the receipt. I still rake the leaves off his empty grave every October, because she wanted it kept.— a stranger, somewhere
The man who fired me in 1994, who made a whole meeting laugh at my expense, sends me a Christmas card every year now. Retired, lonely, forgetting things. I could ignore it. Instead I send one back with a photo of my garden. He has no idea I lay awake for years plotting elegant revenges I never had the nerve for. It turns out the revenge was outliving my hatred of him. I signed this year's card, warmly.— a stranger, somewhere
Four months after Dad died, the funeral home told me about a second urn, prepaid, standing instructions, his name on the account for forty years. His brother. Dead in 1977, kept in a closet because their mother wouldn't have him in the family plot. I buried them together at dawn with the groundskeeper's help. The plot holds two now. Only the grass and I know.— a stranger, somewhere
Almost is a place. We were almost in 1979, again in 1994, and once more, dangerously, in 2011. Some couples get a song. We got a schedule of near misses. Lately I catch myself doing the math on the next one. My door sticks. I have oiled it.— a stranger, somewhere
Four ways to receive
Catch a secret the way the night intends
A secret should not arrive like a notification. Pick the ritual that suits the hour.
The Lantern
Catch a secret rising through the dark.
The Bottle
Pull one from the midnight sea.
The Firefly
Cup a glowing secret in your hands.
The Letterbox
Open the one door that glows.
Collections
Start with what you recognise
A few hundred secrets, sorted by the thing they are about. The rest stay in the night, where you trade for them.
35 secrets
Fathers
First my brother died, then Dad two years later, and I nursed them both. At the end Dad asked,…
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35 secrets
Mothers
Call me by my first name, my mother asked in her last coherent request, not Mom, just once, so…
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35 secrets
Marriage
I grieve my marriage more than I grieved my divorce, because the divorce was an event and the…
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35 secrets
Grief
Guilt is a chore chart. My sister flew home for the dying; I stayed three time zones away and…
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35 secrets
Drinking and getting sober
We ended it because of my drinking and I got sober two years later and I've stayed sober eleven…
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35 secrets
Illness and the body
During his last hospital stay, my father asked me to sneak him real coffee. I said no, doctor's…
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How it works
Give one to get one
1
Read what the night offers
Each night opens with two free reads. Spend them however you like.
2
Release one of your own
When they run out, write a secret. It flies anonymously, and the night gives you two more reads.
3
Hold a candle
If a stranger's secret stays with you, light a candle on it. They will know someone held it.
The one you keep
Write to the person you'll be
Everything else here is written for strangers. A letter to your future self is the opposite: sealed until a date you choose, impossible to rewrite in the meantime, and read by nobody but you.
Most people seal the thing they have been putting off saying — to themselves.
You were so sure this would have ruined you by now. It didn't. Go and tell someone the thing you are still not saying.
A few, in the open
What people actually write
Both families disapproved, so we eloped — different everything, the kind of match people bet against. Forty years later, at his father's deathbed, the old man who'd refused to attend our wedding gripped my hand and said 'you were right, I was wrong, thank you for loving my son.' I never told my husband his father said it. He died believing his dad never came around. But I know. And on our anniversary I toast a man who hated me and lived long enough to be grateful, and I toast him alone, and I keep the peace.
a confession · anonymousMy wife's ex sends flowers to her mother every Mother's Day, still, and her mother loves it, and I've decided you can be outmaneuvered by a man who understood which relationship actually mattered.
a heavy one · anonymousWe were high school sweethearts who married and divorced and I remarried and she didn't, and my second wife is wonderful and I love her truly, and last month my first wife was hospitalized and I sat by her bed for a week and my second wife let me, understood, and I held the hand of the girl I married at nineteen while she slept, and I've decided the human heart is a house with more rooms than we're told, and that loving my second wife and loving the memory of my first are not a betrayal but a floor plan, and that I'm lucky, unbearably lucky, to have loved two women that much in one short life.
a confession · anonymousWe met at a hospice where both our fathers were dying, in a hallway at 3am, and fell in love over vending machine coffee amid so much death, and people think it's morbid and it's the opposite, we found the most life either of us had ever felt in the place where life was ending, and I've never known how to explain that grief and love came through the exact same door.
a confession · anonymousMy addiction cost me the years my kids were small, and I can't get those back, no amount of sobriety un-erases a childhood a father slept through. But my daughter had a baby this spring and asked me — me — to be the one there in the daytime while she works. I hold my granddaughter every afternoon in the exact chair I was too drunk to hold her mother in. I know it's a second chance I did nothing to deserve. I've decided the only honest response to undeserved grace is to show up, sober, every single day, and I do.
a small light · anonymousA nurse held my hand while they told me and then her shift ended and she was gone, and I never got her name, and I've donated to that hospital every year in honor of 'the nurse who stayed,' and they've stopped asking me to be specific, and she'll never know she's a line in my will.
a heavy one · anonymousIt begins with yours
No account, no sign-up, and nothing you write carries your name. Put down the one thing you have never said, and read what comes back.
Release a secret →