She was born too soft for the world, or maybe the world was too hard for her. Either way, she didn’t fit. They started calling her Dodo Girl in the fifth grade, after a class discussion about extinct animals. Someone noticed her drawing a bird with a crooked beak and sad eyes. It was a dodo, 도도걸 she said quietly. They laughed. The name stuck.
At first, she didn’t mind it. The dodo had been a gentle creature. Trusting. Unafraid of people. It wasn’t the dodo’s fault it disappeared—it was the world that failed to protect it. But kids don’t understand metaphors, and adults rarely try to. Soon, Dodo Girl became a synonym for strange, awkward, slow. Something cute but out of place. An accident of nature. Something better off forgotten.
She was quiet. Not because she didn’t have words, but because people rarely listened when she spoke. Her thoughts were slow to form but deep. She thought in colors and patterns, not timelines. While other children ran and shouted, she wandered. She memorized the names of trees and the way shadows moved on the floor when the sun passed through stained glass. She asked questions no one had time to answer. Why do people stop believing in magic? What happens to memories when the person who holds them dies?
The world kept telling her to be normal. Smile more. Make eye contact. Speak louder. She tried, for a while. She watched the other girls, how they tilted their heads and softened their voices. How they laughed at jokes that weren’t funny. She practiced in front of the mirror but it felt like folding herself into a shape she wasn’t made to be. Eventually, she stopped trying. The effort cost too much and gave back too little.
She became a ghost in the hallways. Not hated, not bullied outright—just invisible. Teachers forgot to call on her. Students forgot to include her. She spent lunch periods in the library or outside under a tree, watching ants build colonies, imagining herself as small as they were, useful in a quiet way. She read about extinction. Not just animals, but languages, cultures, beliefs. How easy it was to lose something forever without even noticing it was fading.
At home, things weren’t much better. Her parents wanted a daughter they could understand. She wanted parents who didn’t expect her to explain herself. They asked her why she couldn’t be more like other kids, why she always seemed elsewhere. She didn’t have answers. She wasn’t elsewhere. She was just deeper in the same place.
When she was fourteen, a teacher gave her a book about birds. Not as a gift, but as a project. She was supposed to write a report. Instead, she read it cover to cover three times and began sketching her own book, full of creatures that had never existed. Birds with wings like ribbons, feathers that glowed in the dark, beaks that sang instead of pecked. She called them “ghost birds. ” She didn’t show anyone the drawings.
High school was a blur of days that felt like copies of each other. Her locker was vandalized once—someone scrawled “Extinct” across it in red marker. She didn’t clean it off. She left it there as a sign: don’t approach. She wasn’t sad all the time, just tired. Tired of pretending to be less than she was. Tired of performing normal when she didn’t know the script.
Her only friend was an older girl who’d already dropped out. They met at a community art class. The older girl liked to paint storms. She said storms were honest. Dodo Girl didn’t talk much, but she listened, and sometimes that was enough. They spent afternoons by the river, not speaking, just watching the water move. The older girl gave her a notebook and said, “Write things down, even if they don’t make sense. ”
She did. Every day. Strange sentences. Fragments. “What if silence is a kind of language? ” “If I disappear slowly, will anyone notice in time? ” “Maybe the dodo didn’t go extinct. Maybe it evolved into something we can’t see. ”
By seventeen, she had stopped going by her real name. On social media, she called herself Dodo Girl. She owned it now. The nickname that was once meant to isolate her became her identity, not because it defined her, but because she redefined it. She started posting her bird drawings, her poems, her thoughts. People followed. Quiet people, mostly. People who didn’t fit anywhere else. They sent her messages like, “Thank you for making me feel seen, ” and “I thought I was the only one. ”
She didn’t reply to all of them, but she read every word.
She still walked like she was trying not to take up space. She still cried at documentaries about animals. But she was no longer ashamed of her softness. She understood now that survival didn’t always mean fighting. Sometimes it meant enduring. Outlasting. Evolving in silence.