Life & Place · A Decembers list

Every scar with a story behind it

There's the white line above your eyebrow from the coffee table when you were four, the one on your knee from a bike with no brakes, the finger you nearly lost to a table saw. Each one still has a whole afternoon folded inside it.

This is the list for those moments. One line for a scraped knee, a few more for the night in the waiting room.

Add your first incident

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

Point to any scar on your body and the whole story comes back — the exact tile you hit, who drove you, the smell of the disinfectant. The mark is the bookmark.

A medical chart records that you had eight stitches on a Tuesday. It doesn't record that you were showing off on your cousin's skateboard, or that the nurse let you keep the little curved needle in a paper cup. Your family knows you have a scar on your shin; they've never heard how you got it, or that you didn't cry until you saw your own blood. These are the details that live only with you, and they leave with you unless someone writes them down.

Nobody sits down to write the history of their own accidents — it feels like a strange book to make. But a list is different. You add the finger you jammed sliding into second base, then a week later the burn from the woodstove door comes back to you, then the fall down the basement stairs. One line at a time, the body's record fills in. Together they tell you as much about a life as any photo album.

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 ones that come back most

The permanent marks

The scars you can still find with your fingertips — the chin, the eyebrow, the long one from the appendix. Each has a place on your body and a place in time. Some you can date to the exact summer; some you've told wrong for so long the story is better than the truth.

The trips to the ER

The fluorescent waiting rooms, the forms on the clipboard, the long stretch of watching the clock before anyone called your name. Who drove you, whether you went in an ambulance or your own car, and what they finally said when they looked at it.

The day you hit the floor

The faint at a wedding, the light-headed morning you woke up on the bathroom tile, the knees that buckled from standing too long in the heat. The moments the body simply quit for a second, and who was there to catch you or find you.

By where it happened

At home
The kitchen knife, the ladder in the garage, the top step you missed in the dark — most of the marks come from the rooms you knew best.
The schoolyard
The monkey bars, the gravel playground, the gym floor — the childhood falls that a scraped knee and a Band-Aid couldn't quite cover.
On the job
The shop floor, the job site, the office stairs — the injuries that came with a workday and sometimes a form to fill out afterward.
Outdoors
The ice on the driveway, the trail root, the fishhook, the bee sting that swelled worse than it should have — the ones that happened out in the weather.
On the road
The fender bender, the bike spill, the door slammed on a hand — the moments that happened in a car or on the way to one.
On the water
The diving board, the dock nail, the sunburn that peeled for a week — the summers that left something behind.

Other lists you may like

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

Begin

A record of what your body carried and kept

Every scar is a story your family has never fully heard. Start with the one you can feel right now, and put down how you got it.

Add your first incident