They called her Dodo Girl long before they understood what the name meant. It started as a joke—something tossed around on the playground when she tripped over her own feet or got too excited about a bird’s nest in the school courtyard. Dodo Girl, they’d say, with a grin 도도걸 that wasn’t cruel at first but wasn’t kind either. She didn’t protest. Not because she liked it, but because she understood it was easier to let people name you than to explain who you really are.
She knew where the dodo came from. She’d read every book about extinct creatures in the tiny local library, sitting cross-legged on the dusty floor while the world passed her by. The dodo hadn’t been dumb, as most believed—it had simply never learned fear. It had lived in a world without predators until humans arrived, and by the time it understood danger, it was too late. She thought there was something beautiful in that. Trusting the world until the very end.
She saw pieces of herself in the bird—soft edges, round lines, a creature that wasn’t made for the sharpness of modern life.
Dodo Girl wasn’t like the other children. She didn’t laugh at the same jokes or dress the same way. Her clothes were often mismatched, chosen for comfort, not style. She collected feathers from the ground and pressed them between the pages of old books. She hummed quietly to herself in class, lost in thought, always half somewhere else. Some people called her shy. Others called her slow. But she was neither—she simply observed more than she spoke, listened more than she moved.
Her teachers saw her as a quiet case. Good grades, no trouble. But when she handed in essays, they were filled with strange metaphors and questions with no clear answers. “Why do people forget extinct animals? ” she once wrote. “Do we forget them because they’re gone, or are they gone because we forgot them? ”
Her parents didn’t always understand her either. Her mother tried to pull her into the world, buying her the same clothes as the other girls and signing her up for group activities she never liked. Her father encouraged science and structure, facts over feelings. They wanted her to succeed, but they didn’t understand the world she lived in—the one of quiet symbols and faded wings. The more they tried to pull her out, the deeper she slipped into her own space.
She spent most of her time alone. But she didn’t see it as loneliness. Solitude was her comfort. She would walk to the edge of the field behind the school and sit with her sketchbook, drawing imagined animals with long necks, iridescent feathers, and eyes that looked like hers. She wrote stories about lost worlds where soft things survived, not in zoos or glass boxes, but free—forgotten by history, remembered only by those who believed.
As the years passed, the name followed her. By high school, “Dodo Girl” had become part of who she was. Some people said it with affection. Others said it like a warning. She didn’t mind anymore. The name had changed its weight. She wore it like armor now—soft, yes, but protective.
She wasn’t popular, but she wasn’t invisible. People noticed her in the way one might notice a forgotten song playing on a radio at dusk—unexpected and strangely familiar. She had a quiet sort of gravity. Others came to her with secrets they couldn’t tell anyone else. A girl from math class who didn’t know how to tell her parents she loved poetry. A boy from gym who cried when his dog died but felt ashamed to admit it. They trusted her not because she said much, but because she listened.
She never joined any clubs or sports, but she started a wall of sticky notes on the back of her locker. Notes she left for no one in particular—little fragments of thought, encouragement, wonder. “Not everything soft breaks. ” “You are not extinct just because you’re alone. ” “The world is loud, but quiet things still matter. ” Over time, other notes appeared—different handwriting, new voices. By graduation, the locker had become a collage of unseen kindness.
Then, as quietly as she had lived, she left. No fanfare. No goodbye speech. Just an empty seat, an unclaimed yearbook photo, and the lingering sense that someone important had passed through unnoticed. Some said she went to art school. Others believed she moved far away, to a cabin in the woods, or a bird sanctuary where the world still made sense.
But years later, long after lockers were cleaned and names were forgotten, the legend of Dodo Girl remained. People still spoke of her in certain tones—gentle, thoughtful, uncertain. As if speaking her name might awaken something soft in themselves. A reminder of the parts they’d hidden to survive.
They’d called her Dodo Girl, thinking it meant she didn’t belong. But she had always belonged—just not to them. She belonged to a quieter world, one not built on noise and speed but on trust, wonder, and the quiet resilience of things that refuse to harden.