An Idea for a Story

The other day, I was trying to find an idea for what to write about. I was searching my mind for an idea that I had at some point in the day, and my pockets to see if I had written anything down. I couldn’t find anything, so I decided to look through old notebooks, hoping to find something that would spark my interest. I eventually found a notebook, and although I didn’t recognize it I figured that no one but myself had been in my bedroom for so long that it was unlikely it wasn’t mine.
So I opened this small, clearly loved and used, notebook. Inside it was filled with ideas, with random trains of thought or anecdotes from life that I instantly knew could provide the perfect inspiration for nights of writing, or just sitting up thinking up ideas for stories so long and complex that I know I’ll never get along to writing them. I look at this notebook, at the slightly faded pages, and I realize that there’s one story that I came up with that I could write now. Was this my notebook? I had been gifted notebooks so many times over the years that I’m not positive that it is or is not mine. I write down ideas on whatever I can find soonest, so scraps of paper with ideas scrawled on them are not uncommon. But I don’t remember writing anything down in this notebook, although all the ideas are the kinds of things I would wonder about.

The other day, he had an idea for a story to write about, so he pulled out a notebook. He always carried it with him, just in case he needed to write down anything that he might forget. Sometimes it would be story ideas, but sometimes it would just be rambling trains of thought that he didn’t want to lose. So he wrote those ideas down. But then one day his ideas started disappearing out of the journal and he couldn’t seem to stop thinking about them. They would flood his waking hours, crowd the margins of unrelated texts, he could never get any of them out on the page because they were just surrounding every corner of his being.

Today I went to write a story, and I scrolled through my idea document until I found this one. Before I put it on my document, I had written it down on a scrap of paper that I tore off of a page of notes. When I was compiling my document, I found that scrap of paper in the depths of my phone case, and when I unfolded it it was like opening a fortune cookie: I had no idea what I would find within.

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