Forgotten Thoughts

When I was but a boy, I loved reading. My greatest heroes were not basketball stars or football legends, movie celebrities or historical tacticians of some distant violence. No, my heroes were fabricated from imagination, mine and others, and I sought them out in each of their worlds: Narnia, Lord of the Rings, the Boxcar Children, Ender's Game, Taran Wanderer. It should not be surprising, then, realizing that I desired of my future not a successful sports career, or being a film artist or superhero, but to be an author, a definer of story.
Even in my youth, I recall car rides where I invented the catch line the protagonist might say that would catch the villain off guard, shredding his schemes and administering justice; or that perfect phrase that captures the heroines heart; or that aha! moment where the mystery is unraveled, the culprit's elaborate plans falling apart in the face of sherlockian rationale.
I wish, even now, I could have seen those phrases. The mind of a child has immense power, and I suspect that while they might have been unformed, even those trivial lines, in the eyes of a child, contained much magic.  Writing innovation might arrive at any point, and I've learned one must be wary, always possessing some tool for inscription at all times.  Who knows when that character's motivation will be illuminated, sitting in the back seat of a car on the road to nowhere? Or when the opening hook of a story falls neatly into place, or the denouement crashes into your mind like a hurricane of hammers - what if you have nothing to remember these ideas with?
You think, I'll just remember them all later, sometime when I'm at ease and writing in the safety of my home. But will you remember then? Hours later and life impeding? I suspect not. Even today, I imagined some fantastic lines in the car and neglected to set them into a device or notebook of some kind. Now, I sigh at the loss of creativity this world will never see. I'm no titanic author, not now, but my words, to me, still possess much creative merit, however unformed. It is like the cooling of the earth, formless and void. Eventually, I'll put everything into place: plants, seas, life. Every time I forget, the world never gets to experience a dodo bird or a rhinoceros. It may never know, but I'll never see things the same without.