Life & Place · A Decembers list
The moves that set your life on a different track
You still remember the shape of the boxes in the U-Haul, the last look at the old kitchen, the drive there with the radio too loud so nobody had to talk. Some of it was ten blocks. Some of it was a thousand miles.
This is the list for those moves. One line each, or more when the reason you went takes some telling.
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
Name one move — the truck, the new address you had to practice writing — and the whole year it landed in comes back: who you were before you went, and who you'd become by the time you unpacked.
The record of a move is thin. A change-of-address card, a lease, a line on a form that says where you lived from a certain year. None of it holds the argument you had the night before, or the way the new place smelled when you first opened the door, or the neighbor who brought over a casserole before you'd found the plates. The paper knows the address. It doesn't know why you finally decided to go, or what you were leaving that you never quite said out loud.
A move is too big to sit down and write in one piece, so most people never do. But a list asks only for the next line. You put down the year and the city and the reason, and the rest waits. Later you add the thing that surprised you — that the winters were harder, that you missed the noise, that the stranger next door became the closest friend you had. It gets written one move at a time, which is the only way it ever gets written at all.
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 moves that end up here
The one you chose
A job, a marriage, a fresh start you drove toward with the whole life packed behind the seats. You knew exactly why you were going, even when you couldn't have said what you'd find. These are the moves you'd make again, and the ones where you learned what you were actually made of once the boxes were empty.
The one you didn't
The transfer you couldn't refuse, the folks who needed you closer, the rent that priced you out of the only block you knew. You went because staying wasn't an option. Years on, some of these turned out to be the best thing that happened to you, and it takes a list to admit that.
The short one that changed everything
Only a few miles — across town, one suburb over, up to the second floor with a real bedroom. On a map it's nothing. But a different school, a different corner store, a different set of neighbors reset who you saw every day and who you became. Distance was never the thing that made a move matter.
Decade by decade
- 1960s
- Leaving home for the first time — a rented room near the plant or the campus, a mattress and a hot plate and a phone down the hall.
- 1970s
- The starter house in a subdivision that was still half mud, or the apartment where a young marriage figured out how to share a kitchen.
- 1980s
- The move that followed the paycheck — a corporate transfer to a Sun Belt city you'd never once thought about living in.
- 1990s
- Uprooting for the schools or the space, trading a shorter commute for a yard and a district everybody said was better.
- 2000s
- The move back toward aging parents, or the one that finally put you in the town you'd wanted since you were young.
- 2010s
- Downsizing after the last kid left — the condo, the smaller place, deciding which furniture got to come along.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of every address that changed the course you were on
Not the moves that were just moves — the ones that rerouted you. Start with the one you think about most, and put down the year you went.