Family & Relationships · A Decembers list
The kids who knew you before you knew yourself
The one who lived two houses down and knocked on the screen door every summer morning. The one you built a fort with and swore you'd never tell. The one whose phone number you still know by heart.
This is the list for them. One name, and the rest comes back on its own.
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.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Say one name out loud and the whole street comes back, the bikes on their sides in the grass, the voice of somebody's mother calling everyone in for supper.
No record keeps these people. There's no deed, no diploma, no file at the courthouse with Danny-from-next-door on it. They were your whole world for a few years and then a family moved, a school district changed, and they slipped out of the story everyone else tells about you. The grown-ups who knew your parents didn't know who you traded baseball cards with or who you let in on the secret of the loose board in the fence.
That's exactly why it has to be written down one name at a time. You would never sit and compose a chapter about a kid named Ricky. But you can put down his name, and then the transistor radio, and then the summer, and a line later you remember his dog was named Duke. A list lets you come back when the next thing surfaces. The book never gets written. The list fills in, friend by friend, until the people who shaped you are finally on the page.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
The friends who end up here
The one from the neighborhood
The kid whose house you could get to without crossing a street. You met because you were the same age and lived close, and that was all friendship ever required. You knew which window was theirs, which dog to watch out for, and the exact sound their screen door made.
The one from school
Assigned to the next desk, or picked for the same kickball team, and suddenly inseparable. You passed notes, covered for each other, and had a whole language of looks the teacher never cracked. Whatever became of them, they knew a version of you no adult ever met.
The one who moved away
The friendship that ended not with a falling-out but with a moving truck. You promised to write and maybe you did, for a while, in careful cursive on lined paper. Then the letters thinned out. You still wonder, now and then, where they landed.
By how the friendship ended
- Still in touch
- The rare one you never lost, who was at your wedding and still calls on your birthday after sixty years.
- Drifted apart
- No argument, no goodbye, just different schools and new crowds until one summer you simply weren't together anymore.
- Moved away
- The family packed up for another town or another state, and the friendship became a few letters and then silence.
- Reconnected later
- Found again decades on through a class reunion or a chance letter, and you picked up almost where you left off.
- Lost track of
- You'd give anything to know what became of them, whether they married, where they settled, if they're still out there.
- Passed on
- The one you learned too late had died, and never got to tell what their friendship meant.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of the people who were your whole world before you had words for it
These are the friends who knew you first. Start with one name and the summer it belongs to, and let the rest find its way back.