Life & Place · A Decembers list

The nights that stuck, wherever you slept them

A sleeper car rocking through Nebraska in the dark. A tent pitched too close to the tide. A motel off the interstate where the neon buzzed all night and you barely slept anyway.

This is where those nights go. One a line — where you were, who was there, what kept it. A few earn more.

Add your first night

Free to start. Private from the first word.

Where this list lives

This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.

Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.

Lists
A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
Timeline
Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
Inner Circle
Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
See a sample Timeline

Begin with one list. The rest follows.

One line is enough

Write down one night — the cold, the smell of the canvas, who snored — and the whole trip comes back with it: why you were there, and how you got home.

Nobody keeps a record of where they slept. A hotel receipt gets thrown out, a campsite permit fades in a glovebox, and the night on the train is just a line on a ticket you didn't save. But those nights hold more than a night's sleep. They hold the reason you were traveling, the person in the next seat, the argument that sent you to the couch at your cousin's, the storm that changed the plan.

A book would ask you to string them into a story, and so it never gets written. A list asks only for the night itself. You put down the beach, the foxhole, the strange motel, one at a time, on the evenings you feel like it. Over a year the list fills, and what you have is a map of your life told through the places you closed your eyes.

How it works

  1. 01

    Pick this list

    It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.

  2. 02

    Fill in what comes

    A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.

  3. 03

    Invite who was there

    They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.

  4. 04

    Share it, or don’t

    One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.

The nights that come up most

The ones you never planned

The flat tire that turned into a night in a town you'd never heard of. The flight canceled, the airport bench, the stranger who shared a blanket. These are the nights nobody booked, and they're often the ones told most at the table years later.

The ones you slept rough

The tent, the truck bed, the foxhole during training, the floor of a friend's apartment. No mattress, no room service, and yet you remember every hour of it — the cold coming up through the ground, the sound of the rain, whether you slept at all.

The ones with someone beside you

A honeymoon cabin, a bunk shared with a brother, a long drive where you took turns at the wheel and napped in the passenger seat. Half of what made the night stick was who was there for it, and what you said in the dark.

By the kind of place you slept

On the road
The rest stop, the truck bed, the back seat pulled over on a shoulder somewhere between two cities you meant to reach in a day.
On the rails
The sleeper berth or the coach seat you couldn't recline, watching the country roll past a smudged window until dawn.
Under canvas
Tents on tide lines, in national parks, in a backyard as a kid — the ones that leaked, the ones that held, the ones too close to the water.
In the service
A foxhole during training, a barracks the first night, a cot on a base far from anywhere, sleeping when and where you were told.
Roadside motels
The neon, the thin walls, the ice machine down the hall — the places you stopped because you had to, and remember anyway.
Someone's floor
A friend's couch, a cousin's spare room, the borrowed bed that made a hard week bearable when you needed it.

Other lists you may like

Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.

Begin

A record of every place that kept you overnight and stayed with you after

These are the nights that outlasted the trips they belonged to. Start with the one you can still feel — the cold, the sound, the person beside you — and put it down.

Add your first night