15-year-old Emily Trunko from Copley, Ohio was named "Tumblr's Secret Keeper" this week in
a short New York Times piece after launching a super successful — though certainly heartwrenching — Tumblr account earlier this month called
The Last Message Received.
The premise of Trunko's page is simple: anyone from around the country can submit the last message they received from "ex-friends or ex-significant others, as well as from deceased friends, significant others, and relatives." So far, she's received over 2,500 submissions.
"The sorrow appears in a scrolling cascade of text bubbles that contain both small slights, such as being ghosted inexplicably, and huge loss, like losing a parent," NYT's Katie Rogers writes. "It’s hard to look away because the blog is full of stark endings, the kind of sadness that won’t happen to you until happens to you."
Some include explanations.
Others don't.
Trunko told the NYT she believes the website took off because people tend to be more sentimental around the holidays. Her track record likely also helped. "The Last Message Received is actually the successor to an even more popular project the teenager created this year: On
Dear My Blank, more than 17,000 people have asked her to post anonymous letters that they will never send. Just like on The Last Message Received, notes on Dear My Blank are mostly about loss," Rogers writes. Pretty powerful stuff.
See it for yourself on
Tumblr and read the full article in the NYT right
here.
