Clear Quartz

This is close to indestructible. Water, salt, a drop on a rug, it survives all of it. The one fragile part is the tip.

It is also the most common mineral you will ever be sold. Nothing about it is rare and the shop knows that.

Aries, you take up the whole room and then wonder why nobody told you they were tired.

You have a drawer of beginnings. Somebody praised your speed when you were young, and that praise went in deep, and now a slow week reads to you like failing. So you start something new to get the feeling back.

Nothing you began was wrong. You just left before the boring part paid out.

Pick the oldest one back up.

Run your thumb across a face of it. You will feel fine grooves running sideways, left by it growing layer on layer in a crack.

Glass is smooth. Glass carries little round bubbles, and it has been sold as this for as long as there have been shops.

Taurus, you distrust anything too shiny and too cheap, and there is a reason under that.

Somebody sold you something once and you decided you would never be the person that happens to twice. It was not the money. It was the face you made in the car afterwards. You were working out how you had missed it.

You check everything now. It has kept you safe. It has also kept you out of rooms you wanted to be in.

What are you not letting yourself want because it might be a con?

Hot silica water moved through a crack in the rock and left a little behind, over and over, for longer than you can hold in your head. It stopped when the crack ran out of room.

The amplifier story, the one about programming it, is about a hundred years old. It came out of a Western revival, not from anywhere ancient.

Gemini, you will keep talking until the room runs out of space, then go home and say nothing.

You do it fast and you do it well. Somebody laughed at the plain version of you once, in front of people, and you have been decorating ever since. Now you can hold a table for an hour and get home having said nothing true.

The people who love you are waiting on the flat sentence. No angle in it.

Say the plain thing first tomorrow.

People grow quartz in labs now, in hot water, the same way the ground does. It comes out near identical.

Almost nobody sells it to you, because digging the natural stuff up is cheaper. That is the only reason yours is real.

Cancer, you can tell the real thing from the near identical one, and you stayed with the near one anyway.

You were the one who tracked the mood of the house. When it went quiet you knew before anyone said anything. So you learned to come in slowly, and check, and only then put your weight down.

People read that pause as coldness. It was never coldness. It was a small person who found out early what a fast change costs.

Take as long as you need to arrive.

This is silicon and oxygen. The most common mineral on the shelf, and there is nothing scarce about it at all.

Its whole use is that it does nothing in particular. People have used it to hold one plain thing they were honest about, and that is the entire trick.

Leo, being special is doing a job in your life that being loved was supposed to do.

You know who is uncomfortable and who is being left out. You ask, and you mean it. Then somebody asks you and you give the short version, because the long one would take up room.

So nobody asks twice, and you stopped noticing when that started. The warmth only runs one way.

Say the long version to one person.

Hold it against your lip for a few seconds. It stays cool. Plastic would have warmed up by now, and that is the cheapest test there is.

It grew layer on layer inside a crack until the crack was full. Then it stopped, because there was nowhere left to go.

Virgo, you keep filling every space you are given until there is none left for you.

The cupboard gets done on the worst night. Somebody in your house rewarded the useful child. You worked out young that being needed was safer than being known.

The thing you are avoiding is not a task. It cannot be completed, and you are not failing at it.

Leave the cupboard tonight.

Water carrying dissolved rock moved through one crack and built this a layer at a time. It took as long as it took, and nothing was hurrying it.

It is the most common mineral you will ever be sold. The shop knows. It still costs what it costs.

Libra, everybody comes to you to be reflected back, and nobody asks what you look like alone.

You run the whole room before you answer. Somebody's mood used to depend on what you said next, and you were young enough that it felt like your job. Now choosing where to eat can take you three minutes and leave you tired.

You are still doing a job you were handed at nine. Nobody has told you it ended.

It ended.

You can drop this on a wooden floor and it survives. The one place it breaks is the tip, and the tip is the part everyone photographs.

Everything else about it is ordinary. It is the commonest mineral in the shop, and the point of it was never rarity.

Scorpio, you were handed one instruction about yourself and you have run it since without review.

It was one person and probably one sentence. You did not argue at the time. You went home and built a smaller version to bring out in company, and you have run it so long that hardly anyone has met the other one.

It costs you every day and nobody is paying you for it.

Who is the last person who got the whole thing?

Take the label off and this is silicon and oxygen. It is the most common mineral you will ever be sold, and yours is not the exception.

The story about it storing whatever you set into it is a twentieth century one. Sellers carried it further than any tradition did.

Sagittarius, you fill every space you are given right to the edges, then wonder why there is no room left for you.

Somebody spent your childhood listing what would go wrong. Most of it did not, so you binned the whole category. It has taken you places nobody else got to. It has also cost you two things you never bring up.

You are not reckless. You are somebody who found out early that fear was mostly other people's.

Some of it was yours.

Somebody worked out how to grow this in a tank, using hot water, exactly the way the ground does. The result is almost impossible to tell apart.

They rarely bother selling it. Digging the real one up is cheaper than growing it, and that is the only reason yours came from a crack in a rock.

Capricorn, you are the real one and you keep expecting people to work that out without being told.

There was a stretch where you produced nothing anyone could see. You still file it as lost. You were holding something up that would have fallen. Nobody wrote that down, so you did not either.

That stretch is the reason you can carry what you carry now. It grew layer on layer with no one watching.

It counted.

Turn it under a lamp and look for bubbles. Perfectly round ones mean glass. Grooves running across the faces mean this actually grew.

It grew in a crack, layer on layer, until the crack was full. Then it stopped. There was no plan and no purpose in it.

Aquarius, you filled the gap in your family so completely that nobody remembers there was one.

You could explain a friend's whole situation to her in four sentences and be right. Then you go home to yours and go blank. Being the one who understood things was how you got kept around, back when being upset was inconvenient for somebody.

So you file your own week instead of feeling it. It is why you are tired in a way sleep does not touch.

Nobody needs your analysis tonight.

This one grew the slow way, out of water moving through rock, adding a thin layer and then another. Nothing decided it. The crack just filled.

It is the plainest thing in the shop. People have used it to hold one honest thing, which means it holds whatever you were honest about.

Pisces, you hold whatever is put into you and nobody thinks to ask what you wanted to hold.

Other people feel a room and let it go. You take all of it in and then spend the evening working out which parts were yours. Somebody in your early life made their mood your responsibility, and nobody ever told you when that stopped.

So you come home full of other people. There is nothing left for the one person who waited.

What in there was actually yours today?