Words for Nobody

i’ve always been drawn to the ones slightly out of step with their own lives — the characters who don’t fit the story they’re in. this is a series about them: fictional people who live softly, strangely, half in memory. not main character analysis, exactly. more like sitting with their ghosts awhile.

there’s something about the way kathy tells her story that feels like listening through fog. not just distance, but intention — like she’s placed her memories underwater on purpose, to soften the edges. to make the sharp parts less likely to cut.

you don’t realise it at first. how much she’s not saying. how neatly she arranges the narrative to protect both herself and the reader. but once you see it — the shape of her grief, the gentle evasions — it’s hard to unsee.

kathy is not unreliable. she’s deeply, devastatingly reliable. she remembers everything. every cassette tape, every dorm room whisper, every sideways look from ruth. she remembers so well it aches. but she’s been trained to narrate that memory with clinical calm, with a kind of institutional politeness. she’s so good at not asking why, at not breaking the rules of her own role, that you almost miss how unnatural it is.

she’s a carer. that’s how she introduces herself. she takes pride in it — in being calm, kind, efficient. but that identity is a scaffold, built over the rubble of the self she never got to become. she was raised to donate her body, piece by piece. and still, she tells the story like someone gently handling glass: tender, careful, trying not to let the cracks widen.

i think about the girls i knew in school who were too good. the ones who didn’t cry when the teacher shouted. the ones who carried tissues for other people. the ones who learned early how to soothe and smooth and make things okay, even when they weren’t. kathy feels like one of those girls. someone who took responsibility for everyone else’s emotions because no one ever made space for hers.

she never rages. never begs. she loves ruth, forgives her, loses her. she tries — so quietly — to hold onto tommy at the end, but the system wins. it always does. she doesn’t fight it. not because she doesn’t want more, but because she’s never been taught that wanting is allowed.

and when it’s over, she drives to a field where they used to dream about futures they were never going to have. and she watches a bit of plastic caught in a fence. and that’s all. that’s it.

what devastates me most isn’t what happens to her. it’s that she’s been made to believe this soft, silent ending is dignified. that being gentle in the face of annihilation is the highest form of grace.

maybe that’s why i think of her so often.
not just as a character, but as a kind of warning.

about what happens when you're taught to be kind instead of free.

file under: soft ghosts, women who wait too long, memory as mourning.

 They say you never forget your first heartbreak — mine came with a horn section and a deceptively cheerful chorus.

The Beautiful South taught me early that melancholy wears many disguises: a chipper piano line, a baritone muttering something brutal, a chorus you’ll hum in the supermarket and cry about in the car. No band was ever so polite about devastation. “Don’t Marry Her” is a hymn for bitter hope, “Prettiest Eyes” a love song that remembers time isn’t kind, and “Rotterdam” — well, that one just knows.

And then there’s Phil Collins.

Phil, patron saint of the emotionally inconvenient. His voice lives somewhere between a sigh and a plea, and I believed every word even before I understood what they meant. “Against All Odds” is a thunderstorm in slow motion. “Take Me Home” feels like walking alone in a city lit by sodium streetlamps. And “In the Air Tonight”? That’s a song you survive.

These are the artists who made it okay to feel too much, too often. Who said, yes, it’s absurd to be so wounded by ordinary life — but here’s a melody for that. Here’s a drum break that will make your chest cave in. Here’s a line you’ll repeat until it stops hurting, or until it does again.

So this is my love letter: to the unpretentious poetry of pop, to the way sadness sneaks into our softest places via FM radio, to songs that sound like walking home in the rain with your hands in your pockets. To The Beautiful South. To Phil Collins. To every moment that needed their voices.

You helped me name it. You helped me carry it. You helped me dance anyway.