The file they get at eighteen.
Start when they're small. Two things a week about your kid, for years. When they leave home, they take a record of how they were seen the whole time. You can't buy that and you can't make it later.
04 · Kept
It outlasts all of it.
Most of what we feel about the people we love is never written down. It lives in us and then it doesn't. An archive with dates on it is a different kind of object — it can be handed to someone who wasn't there, years later, and they'll know exactly what you saw. That's why a note can be edited but never quietly deleted, and why the timestamps can't be turned off. The archive is yours to keep — or to remove entirely, person by person.
The grandparent book.
Six people, one person. Everyone in the family writes about Dad for a year. Merged into one book for his eightieth. The best gift he's ever gotten, and the thing everyone reaches for after he's gone.
The one you write for yourself.
You'll be old. You'll forget the small things. Except you won't, because they're in here, dated, in your own words, on the day they happened.
After.
Nobody wants to think about this one. But a year of dated, specific appreciations is what you'll want most on the day you can't say it to them anymore. Build it while you can.
The monthly backup.
Every month the app can email you the whole archive as a file. Keep it somewhere safe. It's the one thing in your phone worth backing up twice.