A DICTIONARY FOR THE FORGOTTEN

A Dictionary for the Forgotten

By Lola Dam

Mara had always collected words.

Not unusual ones, necessarily—though she liked those too—but the soft, unnoticed words. The ones that fell between moments. The ones people didn’t realise they were saying.

Her father used to joke that she had a “memory like a net,” catching all the things that weren’t meant to be remembered.

She kept a notebook since she was nine, calling it her Dictionary for the Forgotten

The first entry was:

1. “Almost” (n.) — A word that hums like a promise but lands like dust.

She didn’t explain them. She just defined them the way she felt them.

By seventeen, she had five volumes. Lined up like quiet soldiers on her bookshelf.

When her grandmother started forgetting names—starting with the name of Mara’s mother, then her own, then Mara's—Mara began writing down the things she said in between the forgetting.

67. “Oh, she’s the one with the laugh like birdsong.” (n.) — A memory that remembers sound before face.

Sometimes the entries made her cry. Sometimes they felt like a hymn.

People thought she was trying to become a writer. They asked her about novels and plots and poetry. She only smiled. The truth was simpler: she didn’t want to let things vanish.

The world was always shedding pieces.

She just wanted to hold a few.

When Mara was twenty-six, her best friend, Sam, moved away. No fight. No rift. Just… an opportunity. One of those offers that is too good to refuse.

They stood on the train platform, neither of them quite able to meet the other’s eyes.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” Sam said.

Mara nodded. She’d already written it down:

212. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.” (n.) — The kind of goodbye that pretends to be temporary.

She didn’t give Sam the notebook. That wasn’t the point.

The point was to hold space for what might otherwise go unnoticed.

Years passed.

She moved cities. Took jobs that paid enough but never too much. She kept her dictionaries in a box labelled Glass.

One winter, while walking through a park after her shift, she saw an elderly man sitting on a bench, holding an empty leash. His coat was too thin. His hands trembled slightly with the cold.

She passed him, paused, then turned back.

“Are you okay?” she asked gently.

He looked at her like she was a memory he hadn’t expected to revisit.

“My dog used to wait with me like this,” he said. “She’s been gone three weeks, but I still come.”

Mara sat beside him. Quietly.

That night, she wrote:

398. “She still waits for me, in the shape of habit.” (n.) — Grief disguised as routine.

It comforted her to know that one day, someone might open a book and read these words. Maybe not her child. She didn’t know if she’d have one. Maybe not even someone who knew her.

But someone.

And maybe they’d recognise themselves. Maybe they'd feel a little less forgotten.

One spring, her mother called. Her voice was soft at the edges.

“Do you remember the lullaby I used to sing to you?”

Mara’s throat closed gently. “Yes,” she lied.

But later, she hummed the half-tune she could recall into her phone and wrote:

479. “I remember how it felt more than how it sounded.” (v.)—The act of loving past the limits of memory.

Her notebooks grew thicker. Some pages had tiny pressed flowers in the corners. Others had coffee stains. Most had only a few sentences—curved carefully, like shells washed ashore.

In her thirties, someone found the dictionary. A stranger. A woman in a secondhand bookshop who flipped it open and didn’t understand what it was.

But she bought it anyway.

It travelled. Passed between hands. Ended up in a library’s lost-and-found box with no name on the cover, only the words: A Dictionary for the Forgotten, Vol. I.

Eventually, a librarian read it. Then copied one entry onto the notice board.

Entry 107. “I’ll call you later.” (n.) — A kindness we offer when we can’t bear the finality of goodbye.

People noticed. People began to ask where it came from.

And though Mara didn’t know it, the quiet thing she’d spent her life collecting had begun to ripple outward.

Someone started a project—an online archive. People sent in their own entries.

Mara found it by accident. Scrolling late one night, a headline caught her eye:

“The Words We Almost Forgot”—How One Mysterious Notebook Sparked a Movement of Memory.

She stared at the photo. It was hers. The worn green leather cover. The ink smudged in one corner.

She didn’t reach out. She didn’t need to.

It had always been enough to hold the words.

Now others were holding them, too.

That night, she opened a fresh notebook.

On the first page, she wrote:

501. “I am still here, even if you never learn my name.” (n.) — A presence stitched into the quiet places.

And she smiled.