New moon in Sagittarius. First, let’s talk mutable signs, mutable meaning Gemini, meaning Virgo, meaning Sagittarius, meaning Pisces. Meaning heavy air that absorbs sweat and scent, meaning damp red clay swallowing your foot whole, meaning burning embers that die and catch and die and catch, meaning viscous liquid moving slow and thick and sticky. Apply to your sun, moon, rising, or Venus. Identity and destiny. Inner, outer. Beauty and love. The new moon is dark. The new moon hides before it begins. The new moon is a blank canvas. Black moon emoji. An unanswered blue bubble. A grey bubble and three grey dots. Dot dot dot. Think of what follows a period, what new sentence you will build on this new moon. Choose carefully the first word for the path will narrow and the range of choices tighten for the next word. Possibility constricts and specificity contracts. About this new moon in Sagittarius. It will bring about revelations in matters of love. Revelations are both natural conclusions and new information. Revelations bend the truth to create new realities. Revelations in love. Platonic or romantic, though I am guessing you are hoping for romantic because everyone comes here when they’re wanting in romantic love. Suffering and questioning. Perhaps suffering in questioning. Have you considered those who are happy in love do not reach for the movement of the stars? But. This is what you came to hear. The revelation could be that someone in your life has romantic intentions towards you. They will step into the light with a confession ready at their lips. A confession is not necessarily an offer. Because you have no choice but to receive it. Because an unburdening must pass hands. And now, you hold it. You see now. A confession changes everything. You cannot turn back. Neither of you can. Constriction. Definition. A bend. A break. The relationship has become something else, even if one of you turns away. You cannot go back. This is a new moon. But do not mourn punctuation. The period. Do not bother with what came before. Make your choice. Although, perhaps you are the one taking action. Acting on dormant feelings. Or sudden feelings. Lightning bolt emoji. Do you have feelings? Has the idea of, the possibility of having feelings planted new feelings in your head? Heart? Are you reading this and now considering? Has this idea seduced you? Who could it be? Made you think. Made you look. A new moon calls for honesty, though. Transparency. A black moon in the sky often cannot be differentiated from the darkness all around it, though if the sky is clear, you can make out a faint outline, maybe a circular shadow in a lighter shade of black that’s almost, but not quite grey. Transparency. If you are looking for clarity, you probably shouldn’t have read this. But you’re here now. And perhaps I can help you begin that brand new sentence. With what? With some signs to watch out for. Signs that confirm that what I am telling you is true, will come true, has maybe already come true. Things of significance. Look for them in the coming days and stop looking into everything else. Look into just these specific things. Don’t look into the things they said, whoever she is, he is, they are, and don’t give life to the things in your head. No more invention. Imagination can be a liability, as is too much time. Stop. Spiraling. I’m not questioning why you are here. I’m not ungrateful. Just pull that spiral from inside your skull and through your ear, braid it, and lasso all the signs the world has to offer. Such as. Specifically. BIC lighter. Audiobooks. Ignoring phone calls or Do Not Disturb. Crescent moon emoji. Sailor Moon. Farmer’s market vegetables, mostly leafy greens. Extra pickles. A dog named Pickle. A song about Juliet or Julia. Pink apple. Pink Lady apple. Admire the beauty of the apple, its shape, the hard bark of its stem snapped short from when it was plucked. Its creamy skin that gleams when you hold it and turn it over in your hand under cold grocery store lights. Sprouts. Pink Lady apple. A thing of significance. It’s beautiful and it doesn’t have to mean anything. But it could mean something. Maybe even everything. More signs. The 16th of January. Seven. Seven seven. Which is an angel number, by the way. If you see it, ruminate on the thought that emerges in the moment of its appearance. Or question. The number. Miles on the dashboard. A license plate. Where the hell are you even going? The gym. Your locker number. No, someone next to you. Their locker. Sneak a peek. Seven seventy-seven. Don’t look at the time. A clock can’t spit out those numbers unless time itself has broken severely or you are hallucinating. Instead, more realistically, you may see seven dot seven seven on a receipt for a single origin coffee and gluten-free pastry. Or perhaps seven seven dot seven zero for a jumpsuit that just happens to be on sale and that you definitely decide to buy on impulse rather than through careful planning, and after having done the math of sticker price times sale percentage minus that number plus tax. Seven seven seven. Of course, if you live in a state like New Hampshire or Oregon, that number will be much harder to come across or calculate unless someone has started a business that sells items priced exclusively at angel numbers. And that would be forced. Speaking of, if you’d like a more personal reading, my Tarot and astrology packages for romantic separation and Capricorn season will each cost you seven dollars and seventy-seven cents. That’s all. A deal, really. A steal, even. You worry that I am telling you what you want to hear, but you could hear even more for a price, a convenient price tag, the amount of which confirms whatever it is that you are feeling right now. Because angel numbers are confirmation. Seven. Seven o’clock in the morning. Friday. This is the timing confirmation you are looking for, whether you’re anticipating something or deciding when to act. This is for fire risings. Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn. No. Actually, those are modalities. Cardinal signs. Because I am always trying to start things. Cardinal means the start of the season, the first of the elements, new beginnings, new action. Beginnings are on the mind because of this new moon. New moon in Sagittarius. So, fire risings. Meaning Sagittarius, Aries, Leo. Fire signs. Rising. Your ascendant. Heat. Heat rises. Here it is. What you present to the world. How the world receives you. What is it that you are giving out? What are your immediate energies? Qualities. The ones that are exposed. Which you cannot hide. And I know you have a lot to hide. So much inside, down there. Descending. Ascending. You step into a room, step in front of a person, and your presence licks out, singeing them, your presence burning all around you a halo or corolla or the simplistic outline of crayon flames in a child’s drawing of the sun, your presence, your palpable energy the burning tip of an arrow or the blue-white exhaust flames that boost white and black shuttles straight through the atmosphere. I have a thing for Sagittarius risings. That burning arrow always piercing into the hottest chamber of my heart. I catch fire easily, you see. I have a Sagittarius Venus, you see. This stuff is out of our control. You should know. You felt it. Warmth. Haven’t you ever met someone you could just warm your hands on. On their presence. Even if they were doing nothing. If you were doing nothing. Proximity is fucked, and, like I said, some things are just out of our control. Take comfort in that. Maybe it’s pheromones, maybe it’s fire. Exhaust flames. I’ll ask again: do you even know where you are going? Some vague idea of the stars. Recently, I decided it’s too much work to follow anything into the sky. A frenzied escape is usually quite aimless. And I’ve chased enough fire. I don’t have the endurance. But I toyed with the idea. For you, I did. Ultimately, autonomy mattered more than your pull. And anyway, even if you were here, with me, grounded on this earth beneath a shared atmosphere, a horse-man still has one, two, three, four legs. And they are all for running. Four four four four. This is not one of the angel numbers I mentioned earlier. But go ahead, look at your phone. Check the date. Check the time. Let the numbers sear into the present moment as you hold that thought. Or let it go. Did they text you? Bite your nails. Spin cruel fantasies from the storm clouds of your own making. Now, come back down to earth. The earth gives us pause. What I said earlier about punctuation. I stay rooted to the earth. Unwillingly, though. Through my sun and Mercury. The self. And the self, communicated. With my heavy feet made of sun-baked mud, all I can do is be. And speak while being. Speaking tender truths does not come easily from a mouth of earth, even if it’s loamy. Because you’re not ready, my archer. Not ready for the slow purity of a single green shoot. Are you? Channeled ‘yes’ or ‘no’ confirmations for Capricorn: a resounding no. For Cancer, also a no. Sagittarius Venus? Yes. But it’s outnumbered. Two cardinals to the one mutable, and mutable really just goes with the flow. A river of refusal. To resist. The impersonal waters of one of two answers. Downstream it goes, my Venus. Can’t stop energy. Energies of all kinds are always moving. You would not believe how many among us do not understand this. In my corner of the world, so many heterosexual cis-whatevers peddle drivel. Facilitate poison. Like the idea that masculine and feminine energies are gender-specific. That a person could not have both energies circulating, mingling inside of them. Or even a whole different kind of singular energy. They cannot even imagine. Cannot. TERF witches. Shitty opinions always prefaced with proud declarations, like: unpopular opinion! Red exclamation point emoji, times three. Well, that just does all of us a favor. Like, good to know. In this sense, predetermination is real. This is how it all plays out: TERF witches get bodied and blocked pretty quick. Then we all just move on, stepping around their digital corpses and ravaged handles, leaving behind a mass grave of insipid emojis. Exclamation point. We keep going, keep moving like the gender-neutral energy they refuse to acknowledge and which, by nature, by the way, is fluid. The idea of constant, unstoppable movement and momentum, ironically, is kind of fixed. Remember what I said about predetermination. There is less and less room for certain voices. The voices that lack ears. That refuse to see the person in front of them. Eye emoji, lips emoji, eye emoji. The ones that render themselves obsolete in their immovability. They need to be cleared for the new ones to come in. Are you having trouble with fixed signs this Gemini season? Fixed, meaning: Aquarius, Taurus, Leo, Scorpio. A canister of compressed air. A slab of concrete. A plasma cutter. A clear and perfect globe of ice. At its best, focused, steady. At its worst? Well. A Taurus has been up my ass lately. It’s really made me question things. But let me be more specific: a cis, female, lesbian Taurus. Fe-male. Taur-us. I stopped identifying as a lesbian. It felt too fixed. For me. For. Me. It’s the lack of movement. Like, get out of the way. At its worst, it feels like an internal staidness that demands the same stillness in others. Stay with me, why won’t you stay with me? Stay. Still. Not an earned or considered sense of peace, but stillness as in the halting of movement. A stop. A square button on the radio. Square. A difficult astrological aspect. But a square can be expansive if recognized and accepted as a challenge and worked through. So, I stopped identifying as a lesbian because I wished to keep moving. Movement is not necessarily linear. Our bounds are vibrating all the time. Energy is fluid, remember? What you call yourself doesn’t affect how I see myself. Or maybe it does. It does, sometimes, but in an expansive way. Strangely enough, I learned this from a fixed sign. Leo. A sign that supports, uplifts, shouts in a way that can sometimes embarrass you. Embarrassment is being seen, truly seen. Do you want to be seen? Witnessed? Leos. Loud, depending on your personal measure of volume. The true hype men of the zodiac. Hype people. Who show us that what is fixed can give way to impossible change. You stand your ground and the ground breaks beneath your feet and you stay still and let gravity take you to where you know you’re meant to go. Change seemed impossible for a while. Because change is death. Are you ready to die? Full moon blood eclipse in Scorpio. At least Scorpio knows how to die. So, die. This one’s for the cardinal signs. Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn. Spark, rain, photosynthesis, loam. Sun, moon, rising, Venus. Apply it to whatever you want. Take what resonates and leave the rest. You’re currently in the process of learning how to be patient in slow-moving or unfavorable circumstances. You always assume that the worst is going to happen, especially if you aren’t being instantly gratified. You’re making progress, though. You’re learning to stay grounded, to thwart off anxieties and fears even in moments of true uncertainty. You can’t always hide away and expect others to chase you. I know that you have a habit of holding back when it comes to voicing your needs. Because of rejection. Because of betrayal. Because of negligence. Because of shame. But you can’t let your past color your future forever. Blood moon eclipse. The full moon shrouded in red. You have to leave things behind in order to keep moving. To make space. You’ve already moved past people and situations and patterns that no longer serve you. Healing can look like so many different things. Safety once made you complacent, but now risk has become increasingly appealing. All you needed was a taste of change. If you’re worried, if you’re worried about a person, your person, just. Don’t. Your person is genuine, their feelings are genuine. A water placement, maybe a Pisces Venus or a Cancer Mars. Scorpio rising. They can’t help but be genuine, even if it isn’t obvious, because likely what they truly feel is hidden. Not just to you, but also to themselves. But even so, they see your freedom of thought and feeling. Your openness. You, cardinal, red and winged. Because to put forth one’s honest self out in the world is a daunting thing for many, but not for you. You don’t know any other way to be. They see you and it helps them see themselves. They are trying to accept and nurture their own feelings. Waiting to see if they’re really ready to re-examine what’s locked inside their safe. But they are also waiting on you, knowing that what you need now is slow growth, slow progression. And yet, that is not enough. Slower. You drag your feet. Even as you know what is coming. You are having dreams about them. Their sun is in Pisces, which conjuncts your Lilith in Pisces, which trines your Mars in Scorpio and moon in Cancer. Your grand water trine. Total flow. A psychic Bermuda triangle. All this fantastical theorizing for the disappearance of so many things. But the right things come back, return, if changed. Lilith. You are always dreaming, and for you, dreaming is a kind of work. Your dreams and your emotions feed each other torrentially in every direction. Of course they are appearing in your dreams. This isn’t something you can ward away. And while their presence drips into your unconscious, remember that your real-life presence has a hold on them. This is all to say that this most likely will not work out. You probably already know this. But that doesn’t mean you should close yourself off. Doesn’t mean you should retreat into your shell. Stay open. Toe the shore. Approach the sea. See where it takes you. Water will always carry you to the next thing. Remember that you thrive in the aftermath. Everything all around you so broken and yet here you are, whole. You died in the wreckage. Who you thought you were. Your false self. It was all very messy. It is still messy, but a little less messy now. Pluto squares your sun. Which means the concept of self and the concept of suicide work at cross-purposes. That’s how it was for a while. So much to hide from, such hesitation to allow tension and discomfort to pull you away from your false meadow and its heady perfumes, rope you in its bloody sinew and haul you down into the underworld. Even if you don't know it, you have always been ready to welcome all it has to offer. But it had to be forced. There’s no shame in that. Oftentimes, this is how it happens. Cataclysmic breaks rarely occur with consent. The nodal eclipses last year broke the ground beneath your feet and down you went, the world you knew shrinking so fast, losing color, losing all recognizable shape, and then the darkness devoured you, ground calcium against calcium, your coward’s bones splintering under teeth to which you had so long been indebted, until finally, you were swallowed down the hot, velvet gullet that you had been avoiding since, when? When. And, of course, the truth was: nothing down there was new to you. You had already felt its heat, continually, even if you pretended not to see it. To feel it. The soles of your feet warming with the fires of inevitable conclusion. We were drawn to each other. We couldn’t help it. We saw so much in each other. Dimensional recognition. Scented our matching uglinesses. Their Mars squared your Pluto. We searched for friction to re-open clumsy sutures. We created wounds so we could heal. We healed some. Not enough. Kept bleeding. Struggled and lost balance on slick floors as coagulation eluded us. Or did we evade it. Addicted to slipping on wet surfaces. The sensation, the danger, the illusion of movement. We stayed in one place. We went nowhere. It was all about control. Mars and Pluto. We wrestled for it, even during sex. Especially. The smaller planet won out in the end. The one farther out and away from the warmth of the sun. Pluto, once again. Pluto, in deprivation, prevailing. Because Pluto is alone out in the cold, it knows how to be cold and alone. Because it does not care about being outpaced. It knows itself. Your Pluto is in active conversation with your other planets. Your sun. Mercury. Mars. And their Mars is in opposition to your Mars. This happened in the past and it’s happening in the present even though we already ended long ago. It will keep happening. The planets don’t stop moving and we cannot completely separate our selves from each other, not fully, as we are bound by this continual orbitational pull. Pulled into battle, always. Mars in Aquarius squares Mars in Scorpio. Your Mars steps aside as their Mars gathers its energy. Their Mars sinks its axe into your Pluto’s skull because your Pluto allows it. Death comes for action. Death accepts and death waits. Split bone opens a black maw from its own sundering and Mars is sucked into the broken white bowl, is consumed. Action dies. The friction ends, but for a moment. But movement never ends. You will heal from everything. You decide how. Predetermination is real, though not in the way you think. You will continue moving, no matter how slowly. And yet some revelations come quick, as though its haunches had been bent, taut, ready to spring this whole time. This can be attributed to your cardinality. He had cardinal placements, but was more fixed than anything. You think of him losing his hair, which had always been thin, even before. Before. You think of his dad and his astounding baldness. You already know how his mother feels. Or you think you do. But you don’t know anything. You’re not supposed to know any of this. Not because it is forbidden, but because you are not. Supposed to know. Him. This is a rule you set for yourself. You don’t know him. Did you ever. This is what you wonder in your worst moments of doubt. I don’t remember what it felt like to be sure about you. Maybe I never did. If I close my eyes, I can conjure the color of the walls in my house, but not the exact texture. I don’t know where the paint is pockmarked and rippled. Veined and peeling. Where is the excess. Where is the lack. The color stays the same even as the smog from the city dusts it gray. The last time the walls got a fresh coat was right before you moved in. Their ascendant in your seventh house. Your sun in their first house. Their Venus in your seventh house. You do not say ‘we’ anymore. It took a while to shed the habit. Not because you were attached to togetherness, but because the bulk of your memories included her presence. Remember when you used to read her horoscope. Hoping. Hoping for what. Remember feeling pathetic. Remember being pathetic. My North Node is in opposition to my Venus. Hardship in romantic love. My sun in my seventh house, the house of relationships. Your destiny, your lesson to learn in this lifetime is to cultivate your relationship to yourself. Remember when you stopped feeling that way, stopped feeling pathetic. That feeling still couldn’t manage to choke out the last gasps of curiosity. Why did I want to know. Why did I need to know. Long-term relationships breed their own special compulsions. Mars in Scorpio. An easy placement to blame. Your Scorpio Mars in conjunction with their Scorpio Sun. The need to know everything about them. Those horoscopes. You read them every day. All grouped into modalities. It was a bit confusing, though, because while her sun sign is fixed, her rising sign is cardinal, just like your sun sign. All of your signs are cardinal. That part was easy. But her moon sign is mutable. So you read three separate horoscopes for her, one of which was also yours. It would have been easier to consider just one possibility of present and future. That she could be having three kinds of experiences, each of them different, two of them wrong, one of them right. Or maybe they were all right. All wrong. You no longer had the privilege of knowing about her daily life, the shape of her day, days, months. Years, now. All of its branching paths. You wonder if it’s possible to love a former concept of a person that has been so furiously overwritten by its present iteration. You don’t even stop to consider the reverse. At least, not now, not anymore. The memory of love is not love itself. That I loved you then doesn’t mean I love you now. That I love you now doesn’t mean I loved you then. That I loved you then. That I love you now. I love you now. Venus retrograde. Things end when they’re meant to end. It’s okay to say ‘always’ because timing has a way of smoothing itself out. It’s not justification. So what does it mean to start again? Justification? A full moon eventually leads to a new moon. Almost too quickly. How can it be possible to keep losing a thing, a person, over and over? It’s the frequency that takes the breath out of you. And then. A beginning. Shedding hair all over the floor as new ones lengthen on your head. Full moon in Sagittarius. The first time you met, they had just shaved their head. New moon in Capricorn. They are a little bit different every time you meet them again. Full moon in Aquarius. New moon in Pisces. I haven’t met you yet, but I am looking at a static image of you. I zoom in on a strand of hair curling blonde on the dark wool of your shoulder. Curls of hair on their thigh, newly sprouted. New because they weren’t there back then. You are sure of this. Or at least they didn’t grow that far down. Like they’re reaching for the inside of their knee. The thought of a hand on their thigh does not bother you, but this hair does. The kind of unrecognizable that bothers you. Who even are you. He thinks about his hair, too. Worries about losing it. You think he’s perfect the way he is. You have many conversations. He is easy to talk to, though he does not initially appear so. You are easy to talk to and you have always known this. His Mercury forms a trine to your Uranus. A triangle that breaks things that need to be broken. A triangle is but three lines, but, pull it apart and lay it flat and it becomes a single line with great reach. It is inevitable the way it happens. A line is a means to carry through. An attachment to one way of being that leads to another. Your ease with your gender simply had to follow where it wanted to go, like cells in a vein moving towards oxygenation. A planet is just a body in space. More conversations happen in short succession. They’re happening now. You break the trine and a line grows and extends. Wobbles and remakes itself. Flexibility carries you to where you’re meant to go. New ways of seeing. An angle opens and bends itself into something else. Comes back together. The act of reshaping is both old and new. When will you come back to me. Trine. 60 degrees, 60 degrees, 60 degrees. Hold this feeling. Do not forget it. His Leo sun, his Leo Mercury. He has never known anything but to speak truth to others, but most importantly to himself. His self always changing. Nothing is truly fixed because everything is moving. Moving is leaving. In this way, fixedness is understandable. Ask yourself: how easy is it to leave? I mean, how difficult? What if it’s warm and familiar? What would it take? You should know. You both do. Her Venus conjuncts her Pluto. We always return to Pluto. She wishes for closeness even if every desire is accompanied by fear of equal strength. Pluto cracks every planet it touches like an egg. What will you do then? Reconstitute a sloppy, broken form? Or begin again. Begin again. Once the yolk bleeds yellow, it can never be made whole. A hen, a baby chick, a hatchling was never possible. Take a stone and place it into the groove of an abandoned orbit and surely, it will move. Knowing is not the same as wanting. Sometimes one moves slower than the other. Eventually, the two catch up to each other. And when they touch? Well, you know. Eventually, you wanted more than what you knew. So did she. You both began again. It seemed impossible until it wasn’t. And now you’re meeting at a wine bar one year after your separation and three months after hers. The last time you saw each other everything was sun-soaked green. A different season. You couldn’t really see what she looked like behind those sunglasses. Now, it is as terribly cold as it was in the city where you both lived years ago, living separately, unaware of each other, unaware that you would be different people years from now in a different place. Now, you are here and experiencing the mystery and intensity of her eyes. Outside, you both take joy in hiding inside heavy wool coats, and allow yourselves to indulge in the nostalgia of temperature. You are different people now, tasting air that is familiar but that you know is different. What does it mean to meet someone in a different context? To meet a different version of them? There is so much freedom in curious timing. You can be the new version of yourself while holding the knowledge of who you used to be. Who you are now can be the truth of your self. You are not erasing history. This is not dishonesty; it is movement. Quintiles everywhere. A star. A hexagon. Sun to Mercury. Mercury to Jupiter. Jupiter to Jupiter. You do not know her well enough to know where this is all going. You do not know if you are open to any sort of direction with anyone. Openness used to come so easily to you. They were closed off for so long. You’ve known each other since you were kids. Born in the same year just a week apart. You share so many of the same placements. Mercury, Mars, Venus, Saturn. Same planets, different houses. In your house when your father was breaking walls around your head, their father’s voice broke drunk and mean into shards through the phone. Your Chirons in conjunction. Wounded healers. Together, we learn what it means to give up on the idea that we have to endure everything alone. Our shadows walk side by side and we are witness to each other’s pain. It is good to see where a person bleeds most profusely. Locate those wounds secret even to themselves. It is good for others to see where you’ve been. If you give them the chance. But remember, vulnerability can also be a weapon. Mars enters Scorpio. You wrench your teeth from your wrist, spray blood onto paper and watch it spread and create light as it is alchemized into a fine layer of gold. The Sun enters Capricorn. The evening you were born. Dip your gilded paper into seawater to hasten the setting of the sun. The moon is full. The moon enters Cancer. Jupiter enters Sagittarius. Sink your fingertips in bone-white slurry, place your hands inside the kiln. The Sun enters Aquarius. The day you were born. Tap your ceramic fingers against the glass until glazed powder aerates and falls like snow, settling softly into cataracts over your irises. The Sun enters Cancer. Unfold the blanket soaked in your brother’s afterbirth and press the heavy fabric to your flushed cheek. Venus enters Leo. Turn the blanket over and scream your hate into the weave of cotton that holds the memory of your formerly tiny body and its overwhelming vulnerability. The morning you were born. Watch the fabric smooth into sleek purple, your horrible words stamping paisley all over the fine silk. The sun enters Aries. Mars enters Aries. Wild animal lies. Gnashed into syllables. The night you were born. Press your open mouth against the inviting plane of your lover’s back and exhale your vicious dishonesty into every pore. Fuck her, make your inventions on her skin something more beautiful and true. Saturn enters Pisces. Dream of a white tiger by the edge of a lake. Watch in silence as it takes a thin blade to its own hide. The day you were born. Accept from its claws the plush, snowy slip slashed with midnight stripes, its raw, oozing back healing into bloodless pink the moment your fingers close around the gift. Neptune enters Gemini. Neptune, so blue and smooth and marbled with its waterlogged eye, rotating slow, spinning long, cold nights from swathes of black sky, black, speckled with fourteen imperfect moons. Fourteen years pass when Neptune enters Cancer. I try not to think of where you’ll be in that time, what you’ll look like. You’ve not seen me in a while. Not known me for even longer. Jupiter lumbers past a few years earlier, a looming giant eclipsing the smaller planet, orange and red whorls churning thick and hot against cool, estuarial blue. When Jupiter enters Libra, you are learning how to marble paper, your eyes staring down into a shallow pan swimming in green and black and purple. You take a reed, long and thin, and dip it into the ink slowly, creating liquid storms thick with secret violence with every drag and twirl of your careful fingers. You give me a handmade book that evening, the evening Venus enters Libra. Venus is a glass sphere fogged with warm, cloudy breath colored apricot and pink. Venus orbits the sun faster than the planet under which we fall in love. Two hundred and twenty-five days. You fall out of love. You fall in love again. And then you burn through love after love, experiencing each beginning and each ending sincerely, intensely every time. With lovers. Friends. Peers. Yourself. Fire sustains itself. We can only hope. Two thousand and seven hundred days. You do not fall in love with yourself until you die for the first time. Pluto enters Aries. Caught between Pollux and Regulus, five stars form the constellation Cancer, searing into the cold sky so clearly and confidently the shape of a prong, a tuner, the letter Y turned upside down; two claws, a single cephalothorax. The crab. Your moon. You are dying. And this time, it is final. Pluto enters Sagittarius. You are dying for the first time. A cataclysmic end to the world that you once knew. Begin again. Love again. You know how. Chiron aims its spear of stars in the space between the constellations Scorpius and Libra. Alpha Centauri and Beta Centauri compose Chiron’s front hooves. On the end of Chiron’s spear is the dog Lupus, gored and memorialized in the sky the moment just before his expiry. Lupus will draw his last breath only when the points of light making up his body melt one by one into dark matter, but before then, his stars will burn bright, overtake the hunter who has haunted him and drown them both in the blood of entropic, celestial red. Pluto enters Scorpio. You are being born. The world is opening itself to you just as you are coming into it, screaming plasmatic and beautiful. You and the world, meeting for the first time. This day. The day you are born.