She was always a little different, the kind of different that people notice but don’t talk about. The kind that draws glances in crowded rooms and silence in conversation. They called her Dodo Girl. Not to her face at first, just in whispers, the sort that carry far in small towns and stick like burrs in childhood hair. 도도걸 Maybe it was the way she moved through the world—awkward but purposeful, as if her path had already been walked by creatures who had vanished, leaving only bones and stories behind.
Her real name was forgotten even by those who once loved her. In school, she sat at the back, quiet but alert, sketching birds in the margins of textbooks. She wasn’t good at math or science or remembering to raise her hand. But she knew the migratory patterns of extinct animals, memorized not from textbooks but from hours in the dusty corner of the town library. She could tell you how the dodo didn’t go extinct because it was stupid, but because it trusted too much. It had no predators until man arrived. No reason to be afraid. The world had never taught it fear—until it was too late.
She saw herself in the dodo, and maybe that was where the name began. Dodo Girl. A girl out of time, soft when the world demanded sharpness. Round edges in a place of knives.
The others grew up fast, learning early how to armor themselves in sarcasm and half-lies. She didn’t. She wandered, sometimes physically, often emotionally, searching for something she couldn’t name. She was full of questions—Why do people lie when the truth is softer? Why do birds still sing after the forest burns? Why do we disappear and no one notices?
She kept notebooks filled with scribbles, quotes she half-understood, and letters she never sent. “To the boy who laughed when i said I liked rain—maybe you don’t know that water saves flowers too. ” Or: “To the girl who said I should be less weird—I hope you dream of strange birds tonight. ” It was how she coped, in pages and ink, a private rebellion against a world that didn’t value the unseen.
Her parents didn’t understand her. They loved her in the way people sometimes love with confusion and distance, like holding a fragile object with unfamiliar hands. They wanted her to be normal. Her mother bought her pink clothes and signed her up for dance classes. She went once. The music was loud, the mirrors too honest. She left halfway through and walked home in the rain, her ballet shoes soaked and silent. Her father tried harder, telling her stories about astronauts and warriors. But she wanted to hear about shipwrecks and lost cities—places forgotten, not conquered.
As she grew older, the name stuck. By high school, it was almost affectionate. Dodo Girl, the girl who painted feathers on her shoes and talked about empathy as if it were a superpower. The girl who refused to dissect frogs in biology class and got detention for releasing them out the back door. The one who read poetry aloud on rainy days and stared too long at the sky during fire drills.
She wasn’t unhappy, not exactly. There was a peace in being misunderstood. A quietness that felt like truth. She learned to live with the edges of loneliness, turning them into art. Her room became a sanctuary of found things—bird bones, sea glass, broken watches. She made sculptures that looked like prayers and drawings that resembled extinction.
One day she disappeared. Not in the way that gets news headlines, but in the quieter sense. She simply stopped coming to school. Rumors swirled. Some said her parents sent her away. Others claimed she ran off to join a protest in the city, chaining herself to trees and singing to the birds. But the truth, like her notebooks, was harder to pin down. She left behind only one thing: a mural painted on the back of the school, a dodo with wings far too large, bursting through the sky.
No one took credit for it. Some tried to paint over it, but the colors bled through, bright and stubborn. It stayed there, watching, long after the teachers retired and the students moved on. Some remembered her, in flashes. A feather on the sidewalk. A song sung in the wrong key. A phrase that didn’t make sense until years later.
She was gone, but not forgotten.
They called her Dodo Girl, and maybe they meant it as a joke. But years later, when the world had changed again and silence became valuable, her name returned in conversations whispered across coffee tables and campfires.
“She was right, ” someone might say. “She saw it coming. ”
And somewhere, far from the noise and hurt, she’d be watching. Maybe from a lighthouse built of driftwood and memories. Maybe from nowhere at all. But always there, like the dodo—extinct to the world, perhaps, but immortal in the hearts of those who remembered to look up.