Memories fade like ghosts in the night. Their sharp edges worn and frayed, their once vivid colors now muted tones of gray. I grope frantically to retrieve them, but they’re dusty smudges in empty books shelved within my mind. I stumble through the corridors of my imagination, searching through the labyrinth of ideas. They fall atop each other, tangled and twisted as they dance at the edge of my memory and whisper for me to breathe life into them and tell their story. I close my eyes and grip one tight to yank it free and find I’m wide awake.

This story took many twists and turns as I attempted to pull it together. A random Instagram reel popped up asking: If you wrote a story with a character who was losing their memories, what would the last sentence be? inspired the idea, My mind went on a wild rollercoaster as I worked through my morning routine and thought about what my sentence would be, and then a micro story emerged.

The first version came to me while I was in the middle of meditating. I committed it to paper in the waiting room of a therapist’s office. When I typed it up, I wasn’t sure I liked the direction it was headed, and it was a good thirty-seven words over the one hundred limit. I let it brew for a few days before returning to it, where I rewrote the story in a new light. 

Story ideas come at all odd hours of the day and night. During the day, I’m prone to jot them down. Simple sentences, phrases, whatever inspired the idea. I have a file with single sentences that are story ideas, but my mind has fragments of so many more that came to me at all the wrong moments, and I couldn’t commit them to paper before they faded. Sometimes, bits will float to the surface and I’ll jot it down, hoping it will be enough to remind me of the entire story.