Magnesite

Water full of carbon dioxide soaked through magnesium rock for longer than any country has existed. It rebuilt that rock into white magnesite, one vein at a time, underground.

Then somebody dropped it in dye until it came out turquoise blue. Chip a drill hole and the white is still under there.

Aries, you answered to a nickname for years that you never liked.

You were praised young for being fast. Not for being steady. Not for finishing.

So you got loud at the front of things and went quiet in the long part. You call that quiet failing. The long part is where this rock was made, and nobody clapped for one day of it.

The slow half is not the boring half.

The blue on this was somebody's decision. Plain magnesite is chalk white, and it drinks dye so deep that a scratch will not show you the truth.

Underneath it is magnesium rock that groundwater rebuilt in the dark. That part took an age. The colour took a bucket.

Taurus, you stopped trusting anything shiny and cheap, and you did not get there by reading about it.

Somebody sold you something once. Not a stone. A version of themselves that came apart inside a year.

Now you check everything twice and people call you slow. You are not slow. You remember exactly what it costs to be wrong about a person.

Look at the drill hole tonight. White inside means the blue was a story.

You at a market stall, four seconds of looking, turning a blue bead in the light. It is not turquoise. It is white magnesite that sat in dye until it took.

The white part is real. Water rebuilt magnesium rock underground into that chalk, slowly, with nobody watching.

Gemini, you took the colour all the way through, not just on the surface, and you still call it a phase.

You learned young that the plain answer got you talked over. So you started decorating.

A joke on the front of the sentence, a detour in the middle, an exit built in before anybody could get near you. It works. People find you good company and go home knowing nothing.

What would you have to say if you said it flat?

This is a carbonate, which means warm vinegar makes it fizz. That is how you tell it from howlite, and it is also why water and salt take pieces of it.

Most of the turquoise blue ones are dyed white magnesite. The colour rinses out. The stone does not.

Cancer, you have a reaction you cannot hide, so you arranged your life around avoiding what sets it off.

Somebody arrived in your life all at once, years ago. Big and warm and everywhere, and gone by spring.

You measure people now by whether they can stay ordinary for a long time. That is not a low bar. It is the highest one there is.

Keep it off water. Keep yourself away from anything that arrives all at once.

Magnesite survives being buried and rebuilt out of magnesium rock by slow groundwater. What kills it is a sunny windowsill and a rinse under the tap.

The dyed blue ones fade first. Sun pulls the colour out and it does not come back.

Leo, you live through the burial and it is the daylight that is taking you apart.

You got good at this early, in a house where somebody's mood set the weather. You learned to scan faces before you took your coat off.

Now you know within a minute who needs what, and you answer before they ask. Nobody scans you. Nobody has asked how you are and then waited for the real answer in a long time.

You would not know what to say if they did.

Water carrying carbon dioxide worked through magnesium rock for an age and rebuilt it as white magnesite. It filled veins near old seafloor rock, one slow layer at a time.

Then it got dyed turquoise, because white does not sell. The blue you can see is younger than you are.

Virgo, you have answered to three different names this year and none of them were yours.

There is a person or a year in your life that no amount of care was going to repair. You know exactly which one.

So you sort the drawer and you correct the spelling. You keep the small world tidy because the big one refused to be. Everyone reads that as fussiness.

Leave one thing crooked tonight and see if the room survives it.

Somebody put this in a dye bath so it would pass for turquoise. It is porous enough to drink the colour all the way through, so a shallow scratch gives nothing away.

Check a drill hole instead. White inside means the blue was sold to you, not grown.

Libra, a shallow scratch gives nothing away with you, and that is the whole point of how you were built.

You worked out young that your honest opinion made a room go cold. Maybe it was one dinner table. Maybe it was one person who stopped speaking to you for three days.

So you learned to give the answer that keeps everybody at the table. You are very good at it. The cost is that nobody at that table has met you.

The white was under the blue the whole time.

Hold it to the window and look at the drill hole. If the inside is white, this is magnesite that was dyed to pass for turquoise.

The white came from water rebuilding magnesium rock underground, slowly, with nobody watching. The blue came from a bucket in a workshop.

Scorpio, somebody who loved you asked for a softer colour on you and you soaked it right up.

It was probably said kindly, by somebody who loved you. Easier. Less of a lot.

You heard it and you filed it. You run every real feeling through a filter first to see what it costs you. The people who get the filtered one think you are calm.

Who was the last person you did not edit for?

This is chalk. Magnesium carbonate soft enough to mark with a coin, built underground by water in rock nobody was watching.

The turquoise ones in the case are the same chalk after a dye bath. Water takes the colour straight back off.

Sagittarius, you take on other people's colour all the way through, not just on the surface.

Somebody spent your childhood telling you what would go wrong. Every plan came back with a list of reasons attached to it.

So you stopped asking and started going, and it has given you a life most people only read about. You leave before anybody can tell you to stay. You have never once found out what staying would feel like.

Nothing here is chasing you.

Magnesite lives through being buried, crushed and rebuilt by water. It does not live through a windowsill, a rinse, or a bowl of salt.

Most of it never gets to be itself in a shop. It gets dyed blue and sold under another stone's name.

Capricorn, nobody was there for the part of you that took the longest, and you decided that meant it did not count.

The years you spent quietly keeping something afloat are on no list anywhere. Nobody thanked you. There is no photograph of it.

So you skip them when you total yourself up, and you total yourself up most nights. You were taught that you get loved for what you produce. Whoever taught you that was wrong and also very convincing.

The white took an age and nobody watched that either.

Water full of carbon dioxide moved through magnesium rock and rebuilt it, vein by vein, over a stretch of time with no witness. What came out was chalk white.

Almost none of it stays white in a shop. It gets dyed to sell as turquoise, and a chipped edge gives the game away.

Aquarius, you have passed as something more acceptable for years, and you flinch when anybody sees a chipped edge.

You worked out as a kid that if you understood the system you were safer inside it. So you learned to watch from slightly outside the group.

It made you good at reading people. You have spent years explaining your own life in the third person. You know exactly why you do what you do, and it has not stopped you doing it once.

Knowing the mechanism was never the same as being held.

Somebody chose the blue. Magnesite takes dye all the way in, which is why the fake turquoise in a mall case is so often this.

What it actually is, is magnesium rock that groundwater rebuilt into white carbonate underground. Soft and chalky and nobody's idea of a bargain.

Pisces, you take on whatever colour you are put in, and it goes all the way through.

You take on the mood of whoever is in the room within a minute of arriving. You did not pick that. You were probably a child in a house where reading the mood early kept things calm.

You come home from an ordinary evening emptied out and cannot explain why. People call you sensitive. What you are is unprotected, which is a different thing and a harder one.

Who taught you it was your job to feel the room first?