Watermelon Tourmaline

Hold a slice up to a lamp. Pink in the middle, green around the outside, and it is one crystal, not two stuck together.

It changed colour partway through growing. The fluid feeding it changed, so the crystal changed, and it kept both parts.

Aries, you changed hard at some point and you called it growing up.

There was a year when being soft stopped being safe in your house. So you got faster and louder and much harder to catch out, and it worked, and everybody preferred the new one.

Nobody has ever told you that you were allowed to keep the first one underneath it.

The pink is still in there, under all of it.

Some elbaite gets heated or irradiated to improve the colour. Watermelon slices are usually left alone, because the zoning is the entire point of them.

The fakes are the problem. Dyed quartz and glass both copy the look, and glass gives itself away with round bubbles under a loupe.

Taurus, you can tell a real thing from a very good impression of one.

Somebody performed caring about you once, and you rearranged your whole year around it. Then it stopped on an ordinary Wednesday with no explanation given.

You have not been able to take warmth at face value since, and you hate that about yourself.

The instinct is not the damage. It is the scar.

This crystal was growing pink, and then the water feeding it changed. So it carried on growing green, on the same crystal, without ever starting again.

Nothing was lost in that. The pink is still sitting inside the green, exactly where it was laid down.

Gemini, you have a version of yourself for each set of people, and you are tired.

It started as survival. Somebody in your family only liked one part of you. You learned to lead with that part and keep the rest in another room.

Now you can do six voices and you are not certain which one you would use alone in a flat.

Use the earliest one on somebody safe.

Thin slices crack. There are fine internal fractures in most of them, and an ultrasonic cleaner or a sudden change of temperature will find one.

Warm water only. No boiling, no freezing, nothing sudden. It is hard and brittle at the same time, which is a rarer combination than it sounds.

Cancer, you are strong in exactly the way that hides how easily you break.

People bring you their worst weeks because you are steady. Not one of them has ever asked who you take yours to.

Somebody decided when you were small that you were the sensible one. You have been paying that bill ever since.

You are allowed to be the one who rings.

This is not two stones glued together. It is one elbaite crystal that changed colour halfway through growing, and the boundary follows the crystal's own triangular outline.

That triangle and the lengthwise stripes are how you tell it from dyed quartz. Glass copies show round bubbles instead.

Leo, you built a personality out of the loud half and left the other half unlit.

The soft one was around until about fourteen. Somebody found her embarrassing in public, and you put her in a drawer.

You still perform the confident version for people who have never met the other one, and it is lonely in a way you cannot say out loud.

Both halves are the same crystal.

Put a slice on a window and look through it. The pink core is the oldest part, and the green is what grew around it later.

Now look at the edge under a loupe. Lengthwise stripes down the prism and a three-sided outline mean tourmaline, not dyed quartz.

Virgo, you changed in the middle because the room changed, and you have been calling that being fake.

There is a running list in your head of things about you that would be better if they were different. It started in somebody else's voice.

You were about eleven when that voice became yours. You have not been able to tell the two of them apart since.

Nothing on that list was ever a fault.

The crystal grew in one direction, and partway along the fluid feeding it changed. The colour changed with it, and the growth carried on without a break anywhere.

Nothing had to be repaired. What came before stayed exactly where it was, underneath what came after.

Libra, you keep looking for the version of yourself that offends nobody at all.

Somebody at home used to withdraw when you were difficult. Withdrawal is a very effective teacher, and you learned to be adjustable before you learned to be anything else.

Now people describe you as easy, and you hear it as a compliment and a sentence at the same time.

Which parts of you did they never meet?

Cracked slices sometimes get stabilised with epoxy to hold them together. Other elbaite is heated or irradiated for colour, though watermelon is usually left alone.

The dyed quartz copies are the real insult. They fake the two colours and skip the thing that made them.

Scorpio, you can spot a repair job on a person from across a room.

You learned that in a house where somebody was fine on the surface and not fine underneath, and you were the only one who ever said so out loud.

Being right about that did not make you welcome. It made you the difficult one, and you have carried the label since.

You were not the problem in that house.

It scratches glass and it still cracks. Hard and brittle at once, with fine internal fractures that open up if you shock it with heat or cold.

Warm water and nothing sudden. That is the whole instruction, and people ignore it constantly.

Sagittarius, you do not slow down for anything, including the things that need it.

You learned young that the way out of a bad feeling was a new plan. A different postcode worked too, often enough that you kept doing it.

What that cannot do is the slow part, and you have three or four things waiting for you that only come apart at low speed.

Stay somewhere boring for a fortnight.

One crystal. Not a joined pair and not a repair, just a single elbaite that grew pink and then went on growing green when the water changed.

Both stages count as the crystal. Neither one is the real version with the other stuck on afterwards.

Capricorn, you treat the years before you got serious as a rough draft.

There is a whole self back there who was funny and impractical and liked things for no reason, and you talk about her as a phase you got over.

Somebody made maturity sound like a debt you owed. You paid it early and you paid it in full.

She was not a draft of you. She was you, and she is still in there.

Hold the slice against a window in daylight. The green edge is thin, the pink core takes up the middle, and the boundary between them is sharp.

That sharp line is the record of one change in the water feeding it. Nothing else in the crystal marks the day.

Aquarius, you can date the exact point you stopped letting people in.

You know the year and you know the person, and you can describe the whole thing in three sentences without your voice moving at all.

Somebody made an example of you when you were open once. You decided the fault must be the openness rather than them, and you were fourteen.

It was them.

It grew as one crystal and it changed colour while it was still growing. The pink went down first, and the green built around it when the water feeding it changed.

Nothing was taken away to make that happen. Both parts are still here, in order.

Pisces, you went quieter on the outside because the outside got harder.

People who met you after that think the quiet is all of you. You have let them think it, because correcting them would mean explaining the before.

There was somebody who knew the soft version and did not treat it carefully. That is the actual reason the green went on.

Who was allowed to see the pink?