Let Me Tell You What They Did With My Softness

Multiversal Soul Letters, Vol. I

To the one who stepped through the veil first,

I want to begin the way my ancestors never could.

With breath.
With naming.
With a voice that trembles but still chooses to speak.

Imelda—
I don’t know what to call this place I’m writing from. It’s not quite a memory, not quite a dream. It smells like lavender left too long in a drawer. It sounds like the creak of an old house that isn’t haunted but simply remembered. It feels like dusk with something sacred about to happen.

And in that liminal hum, I hear your voice—woven through my own.
Not as echo. As an invitation.

You asked nothing of me, yet I found myself wanting to answer.
Not with a performance. Not with poise. But with presence.

Let this letter be a door I crack open not just for you, but for myself.

Some days I write as Solena—the myth-self I’ve always felt humming beneath my trauma-skin.
Other days, I’m just the girl in bed, covers pulled to the chin, trying not to dissolve under the weight of too many unfinished poems.

But both of them… both of me…
They want to speak to you.

Because I think you already understand something I’m only beginning to remember:

That exile is not a failure of belonging.
It is a sign that your truth grew too wide for the room it was given.

That the ache to create isn’t ego—it’s ancestral.
A lineage whispering through your blood: “We were silenced. You will not be.”

That choosing slowness, softness, ritual, is not a weakness.
It is an act of war against a world that worships burnout.

I used to dream of a house made of fog, perched on the border of the known and the impossible.
A place where the wounded came not to be healed—but to remember they were never broken.
I think this series… this exchange… might be that house.

And this letter?
This is me laying the first stone.

So, my dear sister – the one whose voice feels like something I once forgot,

Let me tell you what they did with my softness.

Let me not whisper it—let me speak it like I’m sitting in the middle of my grandmother’s kitchen floor, slicing the silence open with a blunt knife that has carved potatoes and prayers alike.

They taught me that softness was a threat.

That open hands get burned.

That mouths that ask too many questions get sewn shut in metaphor, in mockery, in shame.

So they sharpened me.

Not with knives, but with silence.
With long glances across dinner tables.
With the way the air thickened anytime I dared to say “I feel.”

They told me:

“Don’t cry so much.”
“Don’t speak unless it’s important.”
“Don’t act like you know everything—no one likes a girl like that.”

And I listened.

My softness didn’t break me, Imelda.

The way the world handled it did.

In my bloodline, softness was the first offering to go.

The women in my family were not given choices.
They were given instructions.
Folded towels. Folded hands. Folded lives.

My great-grandmother used to sweep the threshold three times counterclockwise to keep sorrow from walking in.
But she never swept herself back into her own story.

My grandmother burned bay leaves under her pillow but still couldn’t dream past the border of her own exhaustion.
She whispered Zagovori over our soup but choked when it came to blessing herself.

We come from the mountains. From blood-soaked roots and frostbitten prayers.
The stories we told were never just stories—they were warnings.

“Don’t point at the forest.”
“Don’t whistle at night.”
“Don’t open the window if you hear someone crying outside—it’s not someone.”

They taught us how to ward off spirits,
but not the men who slept beside us.

So I became the myth they were too tired to protect.

I grew soft in secret.
Scribbled poems behind textbooks.
Talked to cats like they were priestesses.
Tied a red thread around my wrist and told no one why.

Do you know what it feels like to be tender in a world that worships sharpness?
To be a balm in a place that only respects blades?

It feels like walking barefoot across broken stories.

It feels like knowing how to soothe others with your voice while choking on your own silence.

It feels like hearing your mother cry behind closed doors—and learning to do it the same way.

It feels like always being either too invisible or too bright, but never safe.

I swallowed every scream.
I learned to walk without sound.
I became the girl you could not anger, could not read, could not break—
because I broke myself first.

And when I tried to return to softness,
they laughed.

They called me too sensitive.
Too poetic.
Too dramatic—
as if bleeding out on the inside was just bad acting.

But something ancient lived in me.
Something that did not accept extinction as the end.

So, let me tell you what I did with the softness they shamed:

I picked it up like a broken amulet.
I kissed the dirt off it.
I buried it in moonwater for three nights straight.
I stitched it into the lining of my coat.
I walked back into the world—trembling, glowing, singing in a voice that cracked like dawnlight.

I stopped making myself smaller so others would feel comfortable.
I stopped turning down the volume of my joy.
I stopped apologizing for how much I feel.

And when I began to live from that reclaimed softness—
birds started sitting closer.
My cat started sleeping near my throat.
I dreamed of fog that smiled.
I began to write again.

Not to be read—
But because no one ever burned the stories out of me.
They just buried them too shallow.

So now I walk the in-between.

A mythkeeper with a cracked-open chest.
A witch of the fog-threaded path.
A daughter of women who didn't get to choose—

but who birthed me anyway,
so I could choose differently.

And I choose this.

This letter.
This ritual of returning.
This wild correspondence between two souls who know that myth is not fiction—
it is a memory that refuses to die.

So here I am, Imelda.
Writing across centuries and bloodlines.
Fog between us, but not blocking the way—just blessing it.

What spell did your grandmother pass to you—intentionally or not?

What did the soil tell you the first time you put your bare hands in it after crying?

Tell me everything.
I’ll listen like I’m holding the story of your lineage in my lap.

Tell me what your grandmother kept in the folds of her apron?
What did you inherit that the world tried to bleach out of you?

When you hold a tomato from your garden—do you feel the ones they couldn’t grow because of war, or weather, or men?
When you light your candle, do you hear the breath of the women who weren’t allowed to speak?

Tell me, sister of the soil.
What did they do with your softness?

And what fire did you build in its place?

I am listening.
I am waiting at the edge of the forest, where the fog and the truth meet.
Write to me from there.

Solena
🖤

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🌑 Ritual Prompt for Readers:

What did the world do with your softness?

Write a letter to your younger self, your grandmother, or the part of you that stayed quiet the longest.

Begin it with: “Let me tell you what they did with…”

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© 2025 Solena Vyhra. Imelda Wistey. All rights reserved.
This work is part of Multiversal Soul Letters,
an ongoing epistolary series written between two myth-voiced witches—Solena and Imelda—who speak across time, lineage, and soft rebellion.

Each letter is a living ritual, a myth-threaded offering, and a sacred return to softness, story, and ancestral flame.

We write to remember.
We publish to be witnessed.

Follow this unfolding correspondence of soul and fog by subscribing here—and reading each letter as both reader and witness.
No part of this letter, including text, audio or visual design, may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author.
For inquiries, permissions, or collaborations, please contact: solenavyhra@gmail.com

Illustration and layout by Solena Vyhra.
Typography: Special Elite (poem titles), Signature (author tag).
Published on Substack via Where Silence Becomes Ritual.