Opal

Opal sits at five and a half on the Mohs scale. Quartz sits at seven, and quartz is what ordinary household dust is made of. Most people who own an opal learn this by wrecking one.

So the trade props it up. A wafer of real opal glued to dark backing, capped with clear quartz, priced like a solid stone until somebody looks at the edge.

You move first and ask afterwards, and it has worked often enough to feel like a system. But moving fast was the thing that got you noticed when you were small, so speed turned into the way you prove you are worth keeping. That is a heavy job for a reflex. Opal does not last by being hard. It lasts because somebody sets it carefully and keeps it away from people who do not know what they are holding.

Put yourself down somewhere safe more often.

Water carried dissolved silica down through cracked rock in dry country and left it behind. Sphere by microscopic sphere, over a very long stretch of time, it built something that splits light. Hurry any part of that and you get plain white silica.

Then people worked out that soaking porous opal in sugar and acid darkens the body colour and makes the flash read stronger. It sells quicker that way.

You take your time and you have been made to feel slow for it. Someone early on treated patience as a shortage of ambition, and the word stuck to your ribs. It was never accurate. What you build holds because you let it set properly.

The fast version of anything is usually the treated one.

Hold a suspect opal edge on. If the colour stops at a dead straight line, you have a doublet in your hand, a sheet of opal glued to something dark. A triplet adds a clear cap. Both contain real opal. Neither is what the label usually implies.

Opal changes colour depending on where you stand. People call that unreliable. It is only light behaving like light.

You get called changeable, and it started with an adult who wanted one fixed version of you and got irritated when you showed up as several. So you learned to apologise for range. Nobody has ever asked an opal to settle on one colour.

Why would you flatten yourself down to be easier to file?

A woman puts her ring in the dish by the sink every night for eleven years. One January the heating runs the flat dry, and a fine web of cracks opens across the stone. No jeweller can put the water back.

That is crazing. Opal holds water inside its own structure, and losing it is permanent.

You hold everybody else's water. It began because somebody in your house needed managing and you were the one who noticed early, so being needed became how you knew you belonged there. Nobody was checking what it cost you. You are still not checking.

The stone that keeps its water is the stone that keeps its colour.

You have been told you are too much light for the room, usually by somebody who was measuring the room and not you.

Opal has the same trouble. It throws colour nothing else throws, so the trade learned to grow it in a laboratory instead. Gilson opal arrived in 1974. Under a loupe the grown stone shows a regular lizard skin pattern, far too tidy to be real.

Your brightness got read as a demand for attention when you were young, and you learned to dim first and check later. That habit is older than any room you walk into now. Real opal has never once apologised for the flash.

Too much for the wrong room is still exactly right.

Smoke treatment works by letting carbon from burning material settle into the open pores of a porous opal. The body colour darkens. The flash reads stronger. Declared at sale it is a cheaper stone, honestly described. Undeclared it is a lie with a receipt attached.

The straight sellers put it on the tag. The rest are counting on nobody asking.

You check things. You always have. An adult who mattered turned out to be unreliable in a way that cost you, and checking became how you kept a floor under your feet. That is not fussiness. It is a repair you built for yourself at an age when nobody else was going to build it.

You were right to ask. Keep asking.

The colour in opal is not pigment. It is structure. Silica spheres of one very particular size, stacked in order, splitting white light into its parts, so the stone gives a different answer depending on where you are standing.

Change the angle and you change the answer. Both answers are honest.

You already knew that about people, and it has cost you. Agreeing kept the temperature down at home, so you got very good at seeing every side and very bad at saying which one is yours. Seeing all of it is a real skill. Refusing to land is a habit you picked up in a house that punished landing.

Pick the angle you actually like. The stone still works.

An opal comes back from the workshop cracked. The jeweller used steam, the way she does with sapphire, and opal cannot take a sudden change of heat. There is no repair. There is only what it looks like now.

Opal is blunt that way. It shows every mistake anybody makes with it.

You do not forgive the way other people seem to, and it is not cruelty. Somebody taught you early that a betrayal is information rather than an accident, and information was the thing you were never given enough of. So you keep a record. The record is a defence, whatever anyone has told you about it.

A stone that shows its damage is a truthful stone, not a broken one.

Australia produces most of the world's precious opal. Ethiopia arrived in force in 2008 and changed the market almost overnight, because the Wollo material is porous, which makes it cheaper and far easier to treat.

One word, two very different stones, one price bracket doing an enormous amount of work.

You want the wider version of everything and you always have. That started as an exit rather than a taste. Somewhere back there staying put meant being available for something you did not want to be available for, so movement became safety and then became your whole personality. Actual freedom is quieter than that.

Go because it is good, not because standing still feels unsafe.

Impregnation with oil or plastic sits on the accepted list of opal treatments, and it hides fine cracks well. The stone looks sound in the tray. A year later the filler shifts and the crack comes back exactly where it was.

A covered fault is not a fixed fault. It never was.

You carry loads that were handed to you before you were old enough to refuse them. There was a stretch when nobody else in the house was going to be the responsible one, so you became it, and the role has outlasted the emergency by decades. Everyone still assumes you are fine, because you have never once said otherwise.

The crack is allowed to be a crack. Filling it only moves the date.

You stand slightly outside the group. Close enough to help, far enough back to see the shape of the thing. People read that as coldness. It is closer to a vantage point.

Opal is not strictly a mineral. There is no repeating order inside it at all, no crystal structure, just silica and water arranged without a pattern, which is precisely why it does what nothing else does.

Somebody in your first ten years made it clear that belonging came with conditions you were not willing to sign, so you learned to stand near people instead of inside them. That was a sound decision for a child. It is a lonelier one at your age.

No repeating order, and still the most colour in the case.

Opal is what happens when water gets into rock and does not leave. A fifth of some opal is water by weight, held inside the silica itself. Take that water away and the stone crazes into a net of fine cracks.

Everything good about it depends on the part that makes it fragile.

You were told to toughen up by someone who had no idea what they were asking you to hand over. So you tried, and the parts that dried out were the exact parts people came to you for. Feeling all of it is not a fault waiting to be corrected. It is the water.

What would you actually lose if you stopped trying to dry out?