Our Character on the Sidelines

Image Description: A minimalist interior view of a modern conference centre corridor. Floor-to-ceiling glass creates layered reflections of the interior space and the trees outside, blurring inside and outside. Conference signage and a resting lanyard suggest ongoing sessions without centring any individual. The image conveys presence without performance, and a resting point within movement, echoing the story’s themes of flux, ease, and non-resolution.

They met on the margins, which felt appropriate.

The conference centre was loud in the way conferences always are — voices bouncing off hard surfaces, badges swinging, urgency disguised as networking. Panels on neurodivergence filled the program, each promising clarity, language, frameworks. Between sessions, people gathered in clusters, rehearsing insight.

Our character had stepped aside, literally. A long corridor with windows looking out over a strip of trees. A ledge wide enough to lean against. The hum of conversation softened there.

They were reading the back of the program when someone said their name — not loudly, just enough to test whether it still belonged to them.

They turned. Recognition took a second longer than politeness allows, then arrived fully.

They hadn’t seen each other in years.

The friend laughed lightly at the coincidence. “Of all places.”

“Yes,” our character said. “Exactly.”

They talked first about the conference itself — the keynote that morning, the familiar language returning with new emphasis, the careful care people took not to say the wrong thing. It was easy talk, but not empty.

Eventually the friend asked, “So how are you, really?”

Our character looked back toward the windows. Then nodded, as if deciding to speak.

“There’s something I’ve been living with,” they said. “I usually call it a flux, though that’s never quite right.”

The friend waited. They had always been good at that.

“It moves through states,” our character continued. “Some of them are very hard to inhabit. Overfull. Too much sensation, too much meaning arriving all at once. Other times everything drains away. Motivation, colour, momentum. It’s not despair exactly. More like the world loosening its grip.”

They gestured faintly toward the conference rooms behind them.

“A lot of what’s being talked about in there,” they said, “touches parts of it. But none of it really captures the movement.”

“And then?” the friend asked.

“And then there are times when it rests,” our character said. “Not resolves. Rests.”

They searched for words, then let that effort go.

“There’s great ease in those moments. No need to understand what’s happening, or why. No urge to explain myself to myself. I’ve tried to name that state — I keep trying. Other people offer names. Frameworks. Even the AI offers names.” A small smile. “None of them stay.”

“What do you call it now?” the friend asked.

“Nothing,” they said. “That seems to work best.”

They spoke then of how no state lasted. How there were no clear triggers, no reliable practices that summoned ease or banished density. How the movement itself had become more trustworthy than any explanation of it.

“I don’t want to medicalise it,” they said quietly. “Or turn it into an identity. It doesn’t feel like something to be fixed. It feels like a life that moves in a way I didn’t expect.”

The friend nodded. Said nothing. Offered nothing.

The corridor filled briefly as a session let out, then emptied again. Somewhere a bell rang to announce the next panel.

“I suppose,” our character said, “the only story that holds is the one that allows all of it. The flux. The unbearable parts. The ease. And the fact that understanding comes and goes.”

The friend looked at them, steady.

“That sounds livable,” they said.

“Yes,” our character replied. “That’s the word I keep circling.”

They stood there a moment longer. Then the friend excused themselves for the next session. There was an exchange of smiles, an embrace that didn’t try to reclaim the past.

Our character stayed by the window.

The conference continued behind them — its language, its urgency, its search for answers. Inside, the flux shifted as it always did. Not settling. Not escalating.

Just moving.

And for now, that was enough to remain.

Postscript — An Author’s Reflection

Does Our Character need a name?

Convention says yes. Names anchor, individualise, promise coherence. They reassure the reader that this is someone specific, contained, knowable. A name implies a stable centre from which experience radiates.

But that is not the life being described here.

This story is not about a fixed identity moving through events; it is about movement itself — flux, easing, density, rest — and the attempt to live honestly inside that motion. Giving the character a name would subtly suggest a solidity that the story is deliberately refusing. It would close something that is meant to remain open.

Calling them Our Character is not an evasion but an invitation. It keeps the figure slightly ungraspable, shared, participatory. The character belongs neither entirely to the author nor entirely to the reader, but to the space between — the same space in which the story itself unfolds.

Yes, this breaks a rule of storytelling. That is precisely why it feels viable.

Some lives do not resolve into names.
Some stories are held together not by identity, but by continuity.

• Read about the conversation that led into this story - A Seed for Orientation: A Preliminary Conversation