Chrysocolla

Rain got into a copper deposit and worked on the ore for an age, breaking it down and leaving a blue-green crust in the cracks. That is all this is.

The colour is copper, which also means it is poisonous to eat. No elixirs, no soaking, and wash your hands after a chalky piece.

Aries, you are softer than the way you move and almost nobody has been shown it.

You say the thing. You are one of the few who actually does. Then you spend two days going over the exact wording. Somewhere young, saying it plainly got you called difficult.

So you keep going first and paying for it afterwards, in private, where nobody sees that part.

Say it again anyway. It was not too much.

Most chrysocolla on a shelf has been helped. The soft stuff is soaked in resin or glued to a backing, because otherwise it crumbles when anybody cuts it.

That is not a scandal. It is just something the label leaves out, along with the fact that it is a copper mineral and belongs nowhere near your mouth.

Taurus, you stopped believing bright and cheap the year one of them cost you properly.

It was not money. It was somebody who was warm right up until they got what they wanted. You did not see it because you had no reason to look.

Now you hold everyone at arm's length for a while, and you call it being careful, and you are right to.

Look at the backing. There usually is one.

Run a fingernail across it. On a lot of pieces it marks, because chalky chrysocolla is softer than your nail. On others it will scratch glass.

Whichever you have, keep it dry and keep it out of your mouth. Copper is fine in the ground and not fine in a person.

Gemini, you are held together by other people's patience and you have never thanked anyone for it.

You have never once said that you are not okay. You have said forty amusing versions of it. People laugh and change the subject.

That started because the plain version, the first time you tried it, was met with a silence you have never forgotten.

Try it on one person. Pick the quiet one.

Chrysocolla sat in the cracks of a copper deposit for an age. What ruins it is a rinse under the tap and a bowl of salt.

Water leaches the colour and dulls it. Salt goes straight for the copper. Dry cloth, always.

Cancer, ordinary daily things wear you out and the crisis never does, and that has always confused people.

Nothing enormous happened. It was one small swallowed sentence, then another, over about six years, until you stopped noticing you were doing it.

Somebody in your family got upset easily. You learned to work out the temperature of a room from the hallway. You have never been off duty since.

Say the smallest true thing tonight.

Strip the name off and this is a copper mineral. The same element that goes green on a church roof makes this the colour of shallow water.

That is also why it is toxic to swallow, and why the soft kind should never be ground or soaked. Wash your hands after the raw pieces.

Leo, you are ashamed of the plain thing that makes you lovely.

You are the one who fills the silence. You have been doing it since you were small and the silence in a particular house meant something bad was coming.

Now you carry the conversation everywhere, and everyone finds you warm. Nobody knows you went home last Thursday and did not speak for a day.

Who would sit through your silence?

Water spent a very long time taking a copper deposit apart near the surface, and what it left behind settled into the cracks as this blue-green crust.

Nothing about it is uniform. One piece scratches glass, the next gives way to a fingernail, and both of them are chrysocolla.

Virgo, you are held together for other people's convenience and you agreed to that.

You will rewrite an email four times to get the tone exactly right. Meanwhile the sentence you actually need to say to somebody has been drafted in your head since February and never sent.

Being precise was how you kept trouble away as a kid. It worked so well you never stopped.

What have you been drafting since February?

Reconstituted chrysocolla exists. So does dyed howlite pretending to be it, and resin-soaked material sold without a word about the resin.

The real one bleeds. Its colour clouds out into the matrix in soft edges, where turquoise sits in hard little nodules with sharp veins.

Libra, you have been holding yourself together with something you have never told anybody about.

You do not have soft edges by accident. There was a house where saying what you wanted made things worse for somebody you loved, so you stopped doing it and called it being easy going.

Now you can talk for an hour and give away nothing. People leave thinking they know you.

They know the edges. Not the middle.

Press a nail into the chalky part and it powders. That dust is copper, which is why nobody should be grinding it dry or putting it in a drink.

The hard silicified pieces are different. They scratch glass and stay put. Same name on both labels.

Scorpio, one soft sentence has been working on you for longer than most of your friendships.

That is why it stayed. A stranger would have bounced off. This was a person who loved you, being gentle, picking a good afternoon to say it.

Since then you have run everything you feel through a filter first. You work out what it will cost. By the time it comes out it is half the size it was.

The full size was never the problem.

Take the goddess-stone talk away and this is what happens when rain gets into a copper mine. Blue-green crust in the cracks, that is the mechanism.

It is also copper, so it does not go in water you intend to drink, and the soft kind should not be ground at all.

Sagittarius, you are best in the cracks and you need more holding than you let anybody give you.

Somebody underestimated you out loud once. You have been answering that one sentence ever since, mostly by doing things nobody advised.

Plenty of them worked. The ones that did not, you kept quiet about, because you had already told everybody you would be fine.

You are allowed to have not been fine.

This survives being buried in a mine and does not survive a wash. Water pulls the colour out of it. Salt gets at the copper.

Dry cloth, dark shelf, hands washed afterwards. That is the whole care list, and every bit of it is about restraint.

Capricorn, you can survive a great deal and you cannot survive being handled gently.

There were years where you held something together and no one has ever said a word about it. No title came with it. It does not appear on anything.

So you filed it as time you wasted. You keep looking for the year that will finally count. There is always another one after it.

It counted. All of it.

Groundwater spent an age dismantling a copper deposit from the top down, and the leftovers set into the cracks as this. Arizona, Peru, the Congo, wherever the copper was.

The throat-chakra label came much later and it was chosen because the stone is blue. That is the only reason.

Aquarius, you got called the calm one because of how you look, and nobody has asked since.

You can tell a friend exactly what her boss is doing and be right. People rely on you for that. It has been true since you were about sixteen.

Naming things has been your way of staying safe in a room. It has quietly meant that nobody ever gets to name anything about you.

Let one person try.

Somebody soaked this in resin to stop it falling apart, or glued it to a backing so it could be cut. That is standard, and almost nobody mentions it.

Underneath, it is a copper mineral that powders when it is dry. Keep it out of water and out of your mouth.

Pisces, something has been slowly working on you since long before you noticed the change.

Whatever is in the room comes in. You have gone quiet in a car because the driver was quiet, and you did not work out until much later that the mood was never yours.

Somebody called you too sensitive when you were young. You took it as a diagnosis. It was them being tired.

It comes in. That is the whole mechanism.