Can I, just for a moment, stop performing the woman I’ve become—and be the girl I used to be, the one who believed clouds tasted like cotton candy?

“Này Hạt Mềm, hôm nay là một ngày nắng rất đẹp.”
“Này Hạt Mềm, có một con mèo vừa đi ngang qua đây. Nó nhìn thấy anh và thè lưỡi liếm mép như thế này này…”
“Này Hạt Mềm, nói cho anh nghe, mây có ngon như kẹo bông không?”
Này Hạt Mềm, này Hạt Mềm, này em...

The little seed lies beneath a cool, gentle shell, still breathing.
It inhales the scent of earth.
It feels the soft stroke of rain.
And quietly, bravely, it begins to look at the world in its own way.
The seed sprouts.

Hạt Mềm — Soft Seed — is the name I gave myself after hearing someone mention the princess with the soft seed and three apples. I had grown up on tales of knights and princesses, but never once heard of her. And just like that, I fell in love with a name, as if it had been waiting for me all along. As if I had always been meant to find it.

Within a shell soft like mung bean skin — probably the same pale color too — I tuck away delicate things: a line from a book, a song I can't stop playing, a painting I stared at for too long. The gaze of a stranger passing through my life. A story. A kiss. A love. Yours. You, the only one who never asked me to explain this ridiculous name, who simply let it be. The way I did.

Hạt Mềm slowly became my pen name. My other world. A place far away from emails and expectations, where I keep things too precious to lose. Quiet joys. Sacred sadnesses. 

I used to think identity was something you strutted through a business lounge — wrapped in branded clothes and sharp comebacks. But lately, I wonder if the truest parts of us are what we hide. The earrings we only wear when we’re writing. The song we hum in the shower. The old love notes still hidden in a forgotten book. The version of us not made for show, but for witnessing. The moments I don’t know where else to put. 

What if the softest version of me — the one who cries at commercials, talks to birds, dreams in colors, forgives slowly — is the real one?
And everything else is just armor?

I built Hạt Mềm to survive. Now I came back to her to remember. That before we learned to compete, we learned to feel. That before we learned to speak like others, we whispered to ourselves. 

In this trembling world, I write to quiet my mind.
To straighten the doubts.
To become the gentleness to the burdens I am learning to unload.
For just for a moment, I can stop performing the woman I’ve become—and be the girl I used to be, the one who believed clouds tasted like cotton candy.