Video transcript
CApture Film Festival 2025 – 06. Peripheral

[mellow music]

NARRATOR: When I was 14, I used to have this dream. It was a world in which I couldn't speak, not because I was scared, but because I didn't know the language. People moved with purpose. They knew what to do, where to go, what it meant. I didn't.

So I watched. I watched people spill past each other like they were following paths I couldn't see. They spoke in gestures I didn't understand, smiled at the right times, laughed in unison, nodded in rhythms that made sense to everyone but me.

I noticed things, and they glowed, not in some magical way but in that quiet, human way, like there was a light inside them that never flickered, and each one shone a little differently. Some warm and open, some guarded and flickering. Some like they didn't even know they were glowing at all.

On the train, a boy traced the outline of graffiti with his finger. I think he saw it, too. The way beauty hides and what's left behind. A woman held flowers too tightly like she wasn't sure she deserved them. The boy looked at me and smiled. Just for a moment, like he'd caught something in me I didn't know was there. But I didn't know how to smile back. But I kept it.

On my way home, I took a shortcut. The walls were painted, like they were whispering something just for me. A stranger passed by with one shoelace undone. I wonder if he noticed. On a crowded bus, a man held my favourite flowers. He didn't know, but I watched.

And later, somewhere quiet, where the lights don't reach, where things are left behind, I kept noticing and noticing and noticing, and I think that's what saved me, because maybe I don't need to know the way. Maybe it's enough to belong, not in the centre but somewhere softer, somewhere peripheral.

[mellow music]