Botswana Agate

Somebody dug this out of one district in Botswana, cut it and sold it grey and dusty pink. Those are its real colours.

If you have seen a candy bright one, that was dyed. The colour pools in the softer bands and gives itself away in a second.

Aries, you have quit this same thing four times and started it five.

Somebody at home only paid attention when you turned up with news. You learned to always be about to do something.

Now the quiet stretch in the middle of a good thing reads to you as failure. It is not. It is the part with no audience in it.

Stay through one grey month.

Turn it slowly. Grey, cream and dusty pink in even parallel lines, and if you look properly you will find tiny dark eyes scattered through the bands.

Nobody put those there. They are the accident of how it grew, and they are the part no dyed copy can fake.

Taurus, you stopped trusting anything cheap that shone, and one person in particular taught you that.

They arrived generous and left quickly, and you were young enough that it changed the settings for good. You never chose to be careful.

Now everyone gets a long slow audit before you let your shoulders down. Some good ones do not last the audit.

Careful is not the same as safe.

It is chalcedony. Quartz so fine you cannot see the grains, built inside a bubble in old lava by water that kept coming back.

The trade ties it to Botswanan fertility ceremonies. That attribution is loose and secondhand, and you deserve to know that before you build anything on it.

Gemini, you have started the same conversation with yourself eleven times and never finished it once.

In your house the honest sentence made the evening worse. So being interesting became the safest way to be in a room.

Now you tell the funny version of the hard year and everybody believes it. You have never once been asked the follow up question.

What would you say if somebody asked twice?

This one is durable in a plain way. Years of handling and full sun leave it exactly as it was.

Nothing gradual gets it. That is unusual and it is worth noticing, because most of what breaks a thing is slow.

Cancer, you are dependable in a plain way, and it has made you very easy for people to overlook.

Somebody at your table needed you calm, so you were calm at eight and nobody ever revisited the arrangement. Being fine became your job description.

Now you get through the worst fortnight without a wobble. Then you come apart on a Thursday over a photograph and call yourself ridiculous.

It arrived late. It still arrived.

Water came into a hole in ancient lava, left a layer of silica, dried out and came back. It did that for longer than anybody can hold in their head.

Every grey line is one return. The stone is a count of how many times something came back for it.

Leo, you show up again and again and you only count the times somebody clapped.

You were the bright one at home. Someone there was not okay, and a cheerful child kept the house running, so you took that job at seven.

Now you can spot a friend struggling from one text. Nobody has come back for you in a while and you have stopped expecting it.

Who is checking on you while you check on everyone?

It comes out of one district and nowhere much else, so demand outran supply years ago. Dyed pink and purple copies arrived to fill the gap.

The dye always tells on itself. It saturates the soft bands and skips the dense ones, so the stripes come out too bright and too neat.

Virgo, you have started the same repair on yourself about nine times now.

The cupboard gets emptied at midnight. The spreadsheet gets neatened again. Behind all of it is one thing with no fix, and you have known that since spring.

You learned early that a child who needed nothing got left in peace. That was clever then. It is unpaid work now.

Some things are only carried.

Look at the bands. Straight, or gently wavy, running evenly parallel the whole way across, never swirling or looping.

That is how you tell it from crazy lace agate. This one grew calm. The other one grew in a panic.

Libra, nobody has seen a single wobble out of you, and keeping it that straight has taken everything.

One person's mood set the temperature of your whole childhood house. You got fluent in reading it before you got fluent in wanting anything.

Now you can list what everyone else would like without pausing. Somebody asks what you want and the blank arrives, and the blank is the frightening part.

The blank is a habit. It is not a fact.

Strip the story off and this is banded quartz from a hole in old lava. Grey and pink because that is what the water carried, not because anybody chose it.

The colours are quiet by nature. Every bright one you have seen was made louder by somebody who decided quiet would not sell.

Scorpio, the same remark has come back round to you at intervals for twenty years.

You were maybe fifteen. They said it kindly, which is exactly why it stuck to you. Too much, too intense, and a young person takes an opinion as a fact.

Now you weigh a real feeling for what it will cost before you show it. The ones who could have handled you never got to find out.

You were not too much. You were unmet.

Water and heat do nothing to it. Twenty years in a pocket and it comes out the same stone it went in as.

The only real risk is buying a dyed one and never finding out. It survives everything except a dishonest label.

Sagittarius, you keep leaving and coming back, and every round of it lays down another line.

You were told no about a hundred harmless things as a kid. So many of those were wrong that you binned the whole category instead of sorting it.

Now be careful reaches you as be smaller. You go anyway. A couple of those trips cost you more than you have ever admitted.

Which of those nos was actually about keeping you?

Water filled a bubble in ancient lava, left a thin layer and dried, then did it again. Nobody was there for a single one of those returns.

The stone is nothing but repetition. Every band in it is one more time something showed up and did the same unremarkable thing.

Capricorn, you keep turning up for the same dull task and you have decided that makes it worth nothing.

A day that made nothing goes in the wasted pile. So does rest. So does the year you spent holding a household together while everybody assumed you were fine.

The invisible parts never got a well done at home. You took them off your own list too.

It still built the stone.

Somebody in the Bobonong district cut this open and found the eyes. Small dark rings scattered through the bands, and they are not a flaw, they are the reason people pay.

The trade prices them up and says little about where they came from. The stone takes its name from a country, and the country gets a line on a tag.

Aquarius, you give other people full credit and you have never been in the habit of naming what you did.

You explained the family to itself as a child and got called cold for being accurate. So you stepped back, because the back of the room was where nothing landed on you.

Now you know what everybody needs. You still turn your own wanting into a theory before you will say it.

Say it plainly once. Tonight.

Hold it in the light. Grey into pink into cream, and somewhere in there a few small dark eyes looking back at you.

Those rings are only how the layers stacked. No shop can add them, which is why a dyed copy never has any.

Pisces, somebody keeps coming back and leaving another layer on you, and you keep letting them in.

One adult's mood filled your whole childhood house. You had to know it before it arrived, so you got very good at feeling everything early.

Now you are in the middle of something smoky and you have decided to stay. Not because you are strong. Because leaving costs the people who need you.

You did that arithmetic at three in the morning already.