Petrified Wood

Some of this gets dyed to make the reds louder. Where the wood was soft, resin is poured in to hold it together.

It never needed the help. A tree fell in mud, silica took the place of the wood cell by cell, and the rings came through anyway.

Aries, you have been slowly replaced by the person everybody relies on.

You were quick as a kid, and somebody made that your whole name.

Fast. Bright. Off like a shot.

So the slow part of anything now feels like proof you have lost it. You have quit good things at month three, not because they failed, but because nobody ever taught you what month three is meant to feel like.

It took the tree millions of years and no witnesses. The rings still line up.

Pick a piece up and it is cold, and far heavier than a branch. Run a fingernail over the cut end and the rings are still there, sunk into stone.

Nothing was carved. The tree kept its shape while every scrap of its substance was taken out and swapped.

Taurus, you stopped trusting anything shiny and cheap, and there was a reason.

Somebody in your family lost something on a promise. You watched an adult believe a good story and then watched the months after it.

Now you touch things before you buy them. You want weight in the hand and you want to know where a thing came from. People call that stubborn.

Weigh one in your palm tonight. It cannot pretend.

This is not wood. There is no wood left in it at all, only quartz sitting exactly where the wood used to be.

The label says petrified wood because that is what it looks like. What you are holding is a copy made by water, and it is more accurate than any drawing of a tree.

Gemini, you have been swapped out one small piece at a time and the outline is the only original part left.

Somebody at home wanted the entertaining version. You worked out at nine that a good telling got you the room and a flat report got you nothing.

Now you cannot give anyone a straight account of a hard week. You do the funny edit instead. The people closest to you have been waiting years for the plain one.

Is there anybody left who has heard the unedited version?

It survives being buried, crushed and flooded. What it does not survive is a long soak while it is only part turned to stone.

The opalised patches stay porous. Warm water and a soft brush is all it wants, and the soft part is what goes first.

Cancer, you got through the worst year fine, and it is the quiet stretch afterwards undoing you.

Nobody in that house asked how you were doing, they asked what you were doing. So you learned to say fine and then go and do something useful with your hands.

The big griefs you handled better than anybody expected. It is the small ongoing seep that gets you, the same worry at four in the morning, week after week, that nobody thinks to ask about.

The soft part is not the weak part. It is the part still open.

The tree stood, then fell, then got buried in mud before anything could rot it. After that, water carried silica through it for millions of years until every cell had been traded for stone.

Nobody saw any of it. There was no moment where it turned remarkable, only a very long patient exchange in the dark.

Leo, you traded yourself out piece by piece for something that would not break.

You learned that being watched was the safe version of being seen. Attention could be managed. Being known could not.

So you got extremely good at the front of house. Now you can hold a table for two hours and go home unable to say what you felt at any point in the evening.

The rings formed with nobody in the room.

Crumbly material gets soaked in resin before it is cut, and some of it is dyed to sharpen the bands. Poured resin fakes exist too.

The test is plain. Real wood is warm and light, this is cold and scratches glass, and the grain carries on into a chipped edge instead of sitting on the surface.

Virgo, you got replaced slowly, one obligation at a time, and you kept the same outline.

It made sense once. Somebody in that house was unpredictable, and your homework was the one thing in the building that could be correct.

Now you reorganise the cupboard at midnight while the actual thing waits. You know which one is which. You have known for months.

Nothing you tidied tonight was the thing.

Hold a cut face under a lamp and count. Those are the tree's own years, one wet season at a time, kept in stone.

Nobody arranged them. The order was already there and the water simply did not disturb it.

Libra, you can name the year you stopped saying what you wanted, and you have told nobody which.

There was a house where one person's mood decided the weather for everybody. You became the one who read it early and adjusted, and it worked, which is why you never stopped.

Now a friend asks what you want and something in you goes blank. It is not that you have no answer. Because answering first has never once been safe.

Say the first thing you thought of. Do not check the face.

Every part of this tree was replaced. Not coated, not covered over, replaced, cell by cell, until nothing of the original was left.

It is still recognisably that tree. The shape outlasted the substance completely.

Scorpio, you went hard from the outside in, and nothing about you got thrown away doing it.

You were young and you took it as a fact about yourself rather than a fact about them. So you built a smaller version to send in first.

You have been sending it in ever since. The people who eventually got the whole thing did not run. You still half expect them to, twenty years on, with all the evidence sat in front of you.

You changed everything and stayed yourself.

It got buried alive and that is the only reason it is here. Wood that stayed above ground rotted away and went. This one went under before it could.

The thing that looked like the end of it was the thing that kept it.

Sagittarius, you have been slowly replaced by the version of you that copes, and you did not notice it happening.

Somebody spent your childhood narrating what would go wrong. It came in detail, before you asked. You learned to hear care as a fence.

So you go anyway, always, and it has cost you two or three things you would take back. Being under the ground for a while is not the same as being finished, and nobody taught you the difference.

Some ground holds you. Not all of it is a cage.

The tree fell and was buried in mud. Then water moved silica through it, one cell at a time, for millions of years, with no deadline and nobody keeping score.

None of that was efficient. It was simply the only way this was ever going to happen.

Capricorn, you replaced yourself one piece at a time and never told anyone it was happening.

If a day did not produce a result you file it under wasted. Rest goes in that pile. So does grief.

So does the winter you spent driving somebody to appointments, and the Tuesdays where all you managed was getting up and being decent to people.

The rings are the years nobody clapped for.

Taking a piece out of Petrified Forest National Park is a federal crime in the United States. People do it anyway, and the park keeps the letters they post back with the stones years later.

Legal material comes from private land and from other countries. Ask where yours came from and a decent dealer will tell you.

Aquarius, you are still holding something you took years ago and you have never found a way to send it back.

You worked out at about thirteen that if you could explain a group you did not have to be inside it. It was a good answer then and nobody has reviewed it since.

So you sit slightly outside and read the table. People say you are the clever one. Then you go home unable to name a single thing you needed tonight.

Nobody has ever asked you first.

Put your thumb on a polished face. It is cold in a way a branch never is, and it stays cold for a long time.

That is because there is no wood in your hand. The tree's shape is there and everything else was taken out and swapped for stone.

Pisces, you were replaced piece by piece and you still keep every ring of the original.

Someone in that house had to be tracked. You learned to feel the change in a room before a word was said, because knowing early was the only defence a small person had.

The tracking never turned off. You come home from an ordinary evening carrying four other people's weather. If anyone asks, you say you are just tired.

It kept you safe once. That was the whole job.