It began as nothing unusual. The words "See you tomorrow" close countless notes, whispered between children, scrawled in hurried letters, spoken casually at the door. Yet a troubling pattern lies beneath this common promise.
In the archives of a small town schoolhouse, scholars discovered decades of attendance ledgers. At the end of certain pages, beside the names of students who would vanish the following day, the phrase appeared in faint handwriting. Not in the hand of the teacher, nor matching the signatures of the students themselves. Just three words, always the same: "See you tomorrow."
A century later, in letters sent home from the front, soldiers used the phrase in unusual frequency. Mothers received envelopes dated days after their sons' reported deaths, each closing with the same farewell. Investigators at the time dismissed it as coincidence, a common turn of phrase in desperate days. But one officer, poring over dozens of such letters, remarked:
"I no longer read it as hope, but as sentence."
Diaries tell a similar story. One journal ends abruptly:
"Tomorrow we shall walk the orchard, as we did when we were children. I will tell her what I have hidden. Until then… see you tomorrow."
The author was never found.
At first, the phrase passed unnoticed. Only with accumulation did its recurrence disturb. In police reports of missing persons, it surfaced again and again. In the final voicemail of a vanished traveler. In the chalk scribbles on an abandoned wall.
Its tone is never frightened, never reluctant. Always steady, assured, as though the speaker knows something the listener does not. As though tomorrow is not merely expected, but guaranteed — a certainty greater than life itself.
Yet tomorrow, for them, never arrives.