Jet

Somebody in the eighteen hundreds worked out that black glass looks like jet in a shop window. They called it French jet and sold it to people who were burying somebody.

Real jet is fossil driftwood. Put it on an unglazed tile and it writes a brown line. Glass writes nothing at all.

Aries, starting is the loud part, and grief does not have a starting line in it.

You were good in the crisis. You made the calls, sorted the food, drove people to places they could not drive themselves.

Everyone said how strong you were. Nobody warned you the hard part arrives about four months later, in a supermarket, on an ordinary Tuesday. You still have not been given a job for that part.

There is no task. That is the whole problem.

Jet is soft, roughly as soft as your own fingernail, and it hates being handled badly. Water gets into it. Salt gets into it.

It fades in sun and crazes beside a radiator. A hundred and eighty million years, undone by a windowsill.

Taurus, you distrust anything too shiny for what it costs, and there is a reason sitting under that.

Somebody gave you something once that turned out to be nothing, and it was not the object that hurt. It was finding out you had been easy to fool.

So now you weigh things in your hand. You wait. You buy the good one or none at all, and people call that stubborn.

It is not stubborn. You are done being surprised.

A branch fell into the water about a hundred and eighty million years ago and sank into seabed mud. Pressure and burial turned it into jet, which is nearly coal and weighs almost nothing.

It is still wood. It simply stopped being a tree so long ago that nobody thinks to say the word.

Gemini, you can make grief sound like an anecdote and you have done it at three separate tables this year.

You found out young that the quick version of a sad story keeps everyone comfortable. So you made one.

It is funny in the right places and it takes ninety seconds. You have told it so many times you can hear yourself doing it. The long version has never once been out of your mouth.

Somebody has been waiting for it. Pick one.

Hold a piece for four seconds. Real jet warms to your hand almost at once, and glass stays cold however long you hold it.

Most black beads sold as jet are glass or dyed onyx. The cold ones were never wood.

Cancer, you warm to a person in four seconds and it has cost you more than once.

You have a short version now, the one that does not make people at work uncomfortable. You made it easy for them.

Nobody made it easy for you. You go home and the house is loud in that particular way. You tidy, you do not cry, and you call that being past it.

You are not past it. You are quiet about it.

Jet is not a stone. It is wood, fossilised almost the whole way to coal, and light enough that people mistake it for plastic.

That is how the fakes got in. Bakelite and black glass both pass at a glance, and both stay cold in the hand.

Leo, people call you light because you have never let them feel the weight.

When it happened you were the one holding everybody else up. You made the speech. You checked on the ones who were worse off than you.

Nobody checked on you, because you did not look like a person who needed it. You have never worked out how to look like a person who does.

Say it badly to somebody this week. Badly is fine.

Jet survives forty years of being carried in a pocket. It does not survive water, salt or a hot radiator.

Whitby jet is scarce now, mostly picked up off the beach after a storm. The sea gives it back a piece at a time.

Virgo, you organised somebody's funeral beautifully and you have not cried yet.

There was a month when the only thing you could actually do was clean, so you cleaned. You alphabetised things nobody was going to look at.

It was not avoidance, whatever anybody said afterwards. It was the one lever in the room that still moved, and you pulled it because you had to pull something.

The other thing does not need fixing. It needs you in the room with it.

This was driftwood from a conifer forest, dropped into a warm sea a hundred and eighty million years ago. It took all of that to become something you can close your hand around.

People in Britain have worn it for mourning since the Bronze Age. When Albert died, Victoria wore jet, and a whole town in Yorkshire carved black jewellery for a grieving country.

Libra, you have been pressed into something quiet and portable, and you call that growing up.

Those women got to wear their grief where people could see it. You get a black jumper and three days off.

So you carry it privately and keep the room easy, and people tell you how well you are doing. They are describing your manners.

Nobody asked you to make this comfortable for them.

Rub it on your sleeve and hold it above a torn scrap of paper. The paper lifts. Jet builds static the way amber does.

Now put it on an unglazed tile. It writes brown. Onyx writes nothing, and onyx is what most black beads actually are.

Scorpio, you have carried something so long that people treat the carrying as the problem.

Somebody could not hold what you brought them once and decided the problem was how much of it there was. You believed them at the time.

Now you run it through a filter first. You give people the version they can carry. Then you go home and carry the rest by yourself at eleven at night.

You were not too much. They were holding it wrong.

In the eighteen hundreds somebody poured black glass, called it French jet and sold it into mourning shops. It cost less and it looked the part.

It was cold in the hand and it always had been. The people buying it had other things on their minds.

Sagittarius, you have been light and easy company through a year that was mostly grief.

You were told no for years by people who would not say why. So no stopped meaning careful and started meaning obstacle.

It got you out of a town and it built most of what you like about yourself. You have kept moving through a year you should have stopped and felt.

Where are you actually going this time?

Jet is not a mineral at all. It is a tree that drowned, pressed down under seabed mud until it went almost the whole way to coal.

The shop calls it a gemstone because gemstone sells. Nobody at the counter says the word wood.

Capricorn, you keep a ledger of your own days and grief does not fit in any column.

You went back to work on the Monday. Everyone said how well you were coping, and you took that as the review it was and carried on coping.

Six months on you are still on time for everything. Something in your chest has not moved since March. Nothing on your list will shift it.

Put the list down for one evening. It will keep.

Jet does not last the way people assume. Water gets in, salt gets in, and a summer on a bright shelf takes the black out of it.

The Whitby seams are nearly worked out. What is left mostly washes up on the beach after a storm, one piece at a time.

Aquarius, what is left of you turns up after the bad weeks, one piece at a time.

You worked out early that if you understood a thing it could not blindside you. So when it happened you read about the stages.

You could have taught the material. None of it landed anywhere in your body. You have not once said it out loud to yourself.

Understanding a thing is not the same as feeling it.

A hundred and eighty million years ago this was driftwood in a warm sea. It sank, it got buried, and the weight of everything above it did the rest very slowly.

It stayed light. You can hold an age of pressure in your palm and barely feel it there.

Pisces, you feel other people's weather before they mention it, and nobody taught you how to put it down.

You were the one people brought their losses to, from about eleven, because you did not flinch. You held funerals in your head for people you barely knew.

Nobody asked what that cost you. You leave a room carrying somebody else's worst month, and by six there is nothing left in you for your own.

Some of that weight was never yours. Give it back.