Chrysoprase

Chrysoprase gets through almost everything. Water, salt, being worn every day for years, none of it touches the green.

A sunny windowsill does. Light pulls the nickel colour out slowly and completely, and it never comes back.

Aries, you got something good out of a bad year and you refuse to call the bad year hard.

You are the one who says let's go. People love you for it and you have never once had to fake it.

Then the thing gets slow and dull and ordinary, and something in you reads that as failure. Somewhere early you were praised for being fast and never for staying.

Keep it in a drawer. Come back to it in a month.

Nickel-rich rock sat rotting in a hot climate for a very long time. Water full of silica seeped into the cracks and took the nickel with it.

Nobody added it. This is one of the few green stones on the shelf that was never dyed, which is worth knowing when you are paying for it.

Taurus, you stopped trusting anything too easy the year one of them turned out to be a lie.

It was not a stone and it was not a shop. It was someone who told you what you wanted to hear. They kept it up long enough that you built things on it.

Now you need proof, and asking for proof makes you feel like a difficult person, and you ask anyway.

You were right to ask. You still are.

Lemon chrysoprase is not chrysoprase. It is magnesite, stained, and a steel knife will scratch it where the real thing will not.

Dyed green chalcedony gets sold under the name too. Put a loupe on it and you will see colour caught in the little fractures.

Gemini, the more you are out in the open the paler you get, and you keep saying you love a crowd.

The plain answer at the moment is that you have not forgiven somebody and you keep pretending you have. It comes back at three in the morning and you tell nobody.

You learned young that being upset out loud made things awkward for other people, so you got funny about it instead.

Say it once without the joke on the end.

Hold it up. There is no sparkle in it and no fibres running through it, just flat even green, which is how you tell it from aventurine and from jade.

Then put it away from the window. Sunlight takes that green out over months and there is no getting it back.

Cancer, you are the same all the way through and you have been treated as a stand in for somebody better.

You are trying to forgive somebody and it will not stay forgiven. It goes quiet for a fortnight and then it is back on a Tuesday for no reason at all.

Somebody told you at some point that you should be over it. You believed them. You have been quietly failing that instruction ever since.

Grief is not a task with a finish line.

The green is nickel. A metal, taken up out of rotting rock by water, sitting inside silica. That is the entire explanation.

It is also why the sun gets it. Nickel colour fades under strong light and heat, and the trade has known that for a very long time.

Leo, the explanation for you is simpler than the story you tell, and you would hate to hear it.

You know when somebody at the table has gone flat. You adjust before they have noticed themselves. It has been like that since a house where one person's mood set the weather for everyone.

Then you get home and the question of how you are is genuinely difficult. You answer it with a list of what you did.

Shade, not a windowsill. Same for you.

This one takes water, salt, soap and years of being worn. It scratches glass. Almost nothing you own is harder than it.

Then a windowsill undoes it. Not in a day, over months, so quietly you would not notice until somebody showed you an old photo.

Virgo, the good green year came out of a wreck and you still do not want to say that out loud.

There is a loss you have not actually dealt with. Instead you have kept the house immaculate, and everybody has told you how well you are coping.

Somebody praised you for being strong during it, at exactly the wrong moment. You have been performing that review ever since.

You do not have to be well yet.

Water carrying silica moved through cracks in weathered rock for an age, picking up nickel as it went, and set hard as green chalcedony.

Medieval writers called it a stone of hope and of secrecy. They were writing about a thing they could see, which is more than most listings manage.

Libra, you picked up the habit of pleasing in a house you did not choose, and it set hard.

You are still carrying a small resentment you have never once mentioned. Mentioning it would upset a person you love.

So it sits there. You are perfectly kind to them, every time, and afterwards you are tired in a way that sleep does not fix.

What would it cost to say the small one now?

Dyed chalcedony gets sold as this, and so does stained magnesite under the name lemon chrysoprase. A steel knife marks the magnesite. It will not mark the real one.

The genuine stone was never treated at all. Whatever it is, it is that all the way through.

Scorpio, you can take almost anything except being gently looked at while somebody explains you.

That is exactly why it stuck. A stranger you would have written off. This was a person who loved you, choosing a soft moment, meaning it as help.

So you took the whole of yourself and made a version that fits in a doorway. You are so good at it now that people describe you as easy.

You were never too much for the right room.

Take it outside and look. Flat green, no glitter, no grain running through it. That is how you know it is not aventurine and not serpentine.

Do not leave it out there. Sun and heat pull the colour out of it permanently, which is well known in the trade and rarely on the tag.

Sagittarius, the heat you love is also the thing quietly taking your colour.

You have outrun a lot of advice and been right most of the time. That is not luck. You are actually good at this.

There was a loss somewhere back there that you handled by booking something. You have kept booking things ever since. None of them have touched it.

Stay in this week. Just see.

Take the name away and this is chalcedony with a metal in it. Nickel, picked up by water out of rock that had been rotting for ages in the heat.

It is hard. Six or seven, harder than steel, and it still loses everything people want from it if you leave it in the light.

Capricorn, you are tough enough for the job, and it is the being on display that is costing you.

There is a grief you got through by working, and you got through it, and nobody around you thinks it is still going.

You were the one holding the arrangements together while other people cried. Somebody said afterwards that they did not know how you did it, and you took that as the point instead of the warning.

It is still going. That is allowed.

Chrysoprase survives water and salt and a lifetime of being handled. What it does not survive is being left where it can be admired.

Strong light takes the green out for good. The care instruction is basically to keep it out of view.

Aquarius, you hold up under real pressure, and being praised in front of people costs you the rest of the day.

You could explain somebody else's loss to them clearly and kindly, and you would be right. You have done exactly that more than once.

Your own you have filed under something you will look at later. Later has been about two years. Nobody has asked because you seem fine.

Who would you have to tell?

Rock full of nickel weathered in the heat for a very long time and water did the rest, filling every crack with green silica. Nobody helped it along.

It only asks for one thing. Keep it dark, because the sun takes the colour and does not give it back.

Pisces, you can survive nearly anything except being looked at too hard for too long.

You are still carrying somebody else's grief as well as your own, and you have never separated the two, because at the time separating them would have felt selfish.

You were the one everybody leaned on that year. Nobody noticed you were also the one it happened to.

Put yours down first. Just for tonight.