Cherry Quartz

Somebody melted silica in a factory, stirred gold or copper through it for the red, and pulled the hot glass into a long rod. Then it got cut into beads.

Those white streaks are pull marks. Not growth. Just the direction the glass was travelling when it cooled.

Aries, you defended something loudly before you knew what it was.

You do the first week of everything at full speed. Then the applause stops and the work is just work, and something in you goes looking for the next start.

Somebody once told you that you never finish anything. You have carried that sentence a lot further than they carried saying it.

Owning a made thing is fine. Just know what it is.

There is no quartz in cherry quartz. It is glass, made in a factory, mostly in China, and it is at most a few decades old.

Everything written about what it does was lifted straight off rose quartz and carnelian. Nobody had a tradition to borrow, so they borrowed somebody else's.

Taurus, you stopped trusting anything shiny the day you found out what one of them actually was.

It was not a stone. It was a person who was very good at seeming a certain way. You believed them for a long stretch. You were not stupid, you were being decent.

Now you check everything twice and you feel small doing it, and it has kept you safe.

Keep the bead. It is honest now.

Put a loupe on it. If there are round bubbles inside, you are holding glass, because nothing that grows underground ever makes a perfect sphere.

The swirls will run one way too. That is the pull of the rod, still visible, decades later.

Gemini, you tell a better story about where you came from than the true one, and the true one was fine.

The plain answer here is that it is glass and it is lovely. You would have found a cleverer way to say it. You always do.

Somewhere early you learned that being quick got you kept in the conversation. The quick version of you has been doing all the talking since.

The plain answer is allowed to be the whole answer.

Real quartz takes an age. Water, pressure, time nobody was there for. This took an afternoon in a factory and a rod of hot glass.

That is not an insult. It just means the only history in your hand is the one you gave it.

Cancer, you have wanted something real so badly that you talked yourself into the quick version twice.

Nothing enormous has gone wrong. That is why you have never mentioned any of it. It has been small things, over years, each one too little to be worth a conversation.

You became the person nobody worries about. It started as a kindness to your own mother. Now it is just what you are for.

Who is allowed to worry about you?

This one takes water and salt and daylight without any trouble at all, because glass is inert. Nothing common gets at it.

What it does not take is a hard floor. It chips. Real quartz would shrug that off, and this will not.

Leo, nothing ordinary gets to you, so you have no idea what to do when something does.

You are the one who makes the evening work. It started in a house where somebody had to keep things pleasant. You were young enough to think that was just your personality.

So you can go months looking absolutely fine and be quietly running on nothing, and nobody would think to ask.

Ask yourself tonight. Out loud, if you have to.

Somebody chose the colour of this. Gold or copper or selenium went into molten silica in a factory, and the red came out exactly as ordered.

Then it got pulled into a rod, which is why the white runs in streaks. Every one of those lines is a decision, not a growth.

Virgo, you are still embarrassed about something you bought before you knew better.

You are precise about things nobody has asked you to be precise about. The labels. The order of the shelf. The way a message is worded before you send it.

It is not fussiness. Somewhere back there being correct was the only reliable way to be safe. Nobody has told you it is over.

It is over. You can put the pen down.

Take the name off and this is a glass bead. Melted sand, metal for colour, cut off a rod. That is the entire story.

It is also sometimes sold as quartz with cinnabar in it, which is not true, and would mean mercury if it were. It is glass. There is no cinnabar.

Libra, you were made pleasant on purpose, and knowing that does not make it easier to stop.

You can feel a room tilt before anyone speaks. So you get there first. You take the smaller portion and you agree and you find the answer that keeps everybody level.

Somewhere young you worked out that your preference had consequences for other people. You have been quietly paying for that discovery ever since.

Have an opinion at dinner. Just one.

Hold it up close. Under a loupe there are little round bubbles trapped in the red, perfectly spherical, which is the one thing the ground never makes.

That is your answer. It is glass, made in the last few decades, and it is not pretending badly, it just got given a mineral's name.

Scorpio, you were handed a description of yourself you never agreed to and you carry it anyway.

That is why it landed. A stranger you would have dismissed inside a second. This was somebody who loved you, choosing their words, picking a soft moment.

So there is a version of you that goes to dinner and a version that never leaves the flat. You have been running both for years without telling anyone.

You were never too much. You were just unedited.

Everything else in the case took millions of years. This took a factory floor, a furnace and an afternoon.

It is not a scandal. It only becomes one when a shop lets you believe otherwise, and plenty of them do.

Sagittarius, you have been passed around under a description you never agreed to.

You were fifteen and somebody told you that you could not do a thing, and you did it, and it worked. That single afternoon has been running your risk calculations ever since.

It has taken you a long way. It has also meant nobody has ever been allowed to say wait to you and be listened to.

Wait once. See if it holds.

Glass is inert. Water will not touch it, salt will not touch it, sunlight will not fade it. It outlasts most of what you own.

But it chips. Drop it on a tile and there is a bright new edge where the red used to be, and that does not grow back.

Capricorn, you are unbothered by almost everything until one small thing takes a piece out of you.

You were the one they stopped worrying about first. You never gave them a reason to. That started at about eleven, and it saved everybody a lot of trouble, and it cost you the part where somebody checks.

Now a day with nothing to show for it reads as a debt, and rest feels like something you have not paid for yet.

Who last checked on you?

People make this on purpose. Silica goes in a furnace, gold or copper goes in for the red, and the whole lot gets drawn into a rod and chopped into beads.

Then somebody attaches a meaning to it that was written for rose quartz, and prices it accordingly. That is the part worth knowing.

Aquarius, you were given somebody else's role in your family and you played it well enough that nobody checked.

You are the one who spots what is actually going on. Friends bring you their situations because you name the thing nobody else will say out loud.

Being useful in that particular way has kept you at the edge of every group you have been in, and you did not choose it, you just got there and stayed.

Ask for something this week. Anything.

Underneath the name, this is glass. No quartz, no cinnabar whatever a listing claims, and no mercury either, because there is nothing in it but silica and metal for colour.

That does not make it worthless. It makes it a made thing with an honest story, once somebody tells you.

Pisces, you have been given a name that sounds lovely and describes none of what you are.

Everything in the room gets in. You can sit down happy and stand up carrying somebody else's afternoon. It has taken years to notice how much of that was never yours.

Somebody sighed at you for it when you were small, and that sigh is still in the room every time you feel something quickly.

Shut the door for one evening. It still opens tomorrow.