what he said, what i heard

An unafflicted moon, a yoga in the 12th house. Mercury, Mars, Sun.

What does this mean?

A writer, an idler, a misanthrope. The twelfth house; the house of unconscious; latent power. It can be used productively or misused. Even your whole life. A lot of Jupiter though. So maybe you won't be an idler.

How generous, I think.

And the rest: a chart of endings, sunset, moonset. An end to this life. To these lives, rather. Revati, Uttarabhadra, Pisces, death, consciousness of the soul. The south node too, karmic ends.

The South Node, ketu. This I know about. The denial of material things for the purpose of spiritual growth. Even self-denial.

But I'm hardly a pauper. Or meditating in a forest. So how can this be the end?

That part has been completed, he says. No use doing it again.

south node, pisces, unafflicted moon. The end of what? I think. Something that can't be expressed in words. Something we don't know anything about. But there are glimpses of it. In my dreams. The 12th house. House of the unconscious.

I've kept a dream journal since I was seven.

Dreams that crumble and disappear, like Angela Chase's dream of a dress made of saltines, always things left behind. I dream every night. In complex webs, tangles of color, music. People I have yet to meet. A trail of bread crumbs, saltine crumbs. Like the dream of a boy on the street with a boombox listening to Stevie Wonder who manifested in reality the next day. The dream of a monk in orange robes, drinking Coke at the bus stop. I see him a week later and my heart stops. He smiles. And other things I can't explain in words.

I read studies about dreams about sunlight about the human brain cognition neurotransmitters circadian rhythms music language emotion bipolarity. I read and I dream. Beyond this, I don't know what there is. I don't know what other people do, really that is important. And I write. But that is something else, beyond even the scope of those things. I offer writing a gold medal and make it stand up on the top of a three tiered ladder as some vague anthem of my life plays.

But dreams are like dust. Like how some of my best thoughts come while I am in my car, hands occupied with another kind of navigation, one that feels meaningless in comparison to writing. In fits of urgency I pull over, and the words are gone. Sometimes I'm afraid I'll die this way, hands tied, occupied with something meaningless, without having ever found the right words to express what I wanted to, and somehow this seems infinitely more important than anything else.

And then I am defiant. Maybe the thought was intended just for me, like the dream, I say to the desperate part of myself, the part that can't ever let go. To become a part of my DNA, not intended for broadcast. Broadcast is an obnoxious word. It seeks to offend, or rile. I worked as a broadcast journalist once. It overfed one part of me and left the other part starving.

Pluto, Sun, Soul.

I inhabit others, I inhabit myself. A woman in a torn shirt and chapped hands bends over to pick up a rusted can and my stomach twists in knots in a kind of psychic recognition. An elderly man in the grocery store picks endives with so much care and I am him for a moment. He is making a meal for his daughter. She is coming home for the weekend. It is easier to inhabit other people sometimes even. It is easiest to inhabit my mother. She is an extension of me, and I am of her. A hand throws a ball, and there is a singular movement. Momentum, trajectory, arm, ball. it is all the same, it doesn't matter. Her Pluto, my sun. Join the literary magazine, she told me in the 6th grade. It wasn't a question. Not would you like to join the literary magazine? She thought it but maybe she dreamt something in me. Or something in me told her to remind me. To set an alarm clock. Like asking someone, Will you wake me up at 7:00 am? Don't let me oversleep.

Can you outgrow your chart? Start living in the margins of it? Perhaps the natural trajectory is from unbelief to belief and then neither. Because both of these things constrain and bind. I could have been anyone, I could have been born in another country, to other parents. I could have lived out so many of the identities that I curate, I could have been the woman picking up cans, the man picking out endives. I could have lost so much more, I could have gained so much more.

But I wasn't born in a different place. mahadasha north node, antardasha south node. A transcontinental flight, foreign lands, a new life. I was three. And my trajectory shifted. or didn't. It went where it was told. We landed at JFK and there was a sea of white faces, and then snow, for the first time, and then cold. I wore my father's jacket all the way home to an apartment that had parquet floors and a TV that my mother and I watched when we woke up from jetlag at 3:00am.

It's all there, in your chart. Some things you can't change, he says.

Really, I think? Even the snow? Even the parquet floors and the TV? Even my mother and I in the bathroom of our apartment in Queens, me sitting by the sink, brushing my teeth in a new foreign land? Does my chart know of my memories, of the things I said and felt, of cobalt skies from the balcony of my apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, of the moments where it felt I had escaped my fate and felt relieved? Of petty meannesses, loss of hope, of sand between my toes after a day at the beach, a vestige of an important day, of the remembrance of things that shouldn't have been laughed at, of the time that my parents called and told me that a field mouse got in their kitchen and fell into a bottle of olive oil? Trapped and sealed in his fate, despite desperate attempts to escape the slippery green deathtrap in the cupboard beneath the stove. What must that have felt like? To be drowned in an unctuous green prison.

I think of the weary old woman who inhabits me. Not old chronologically, old in a different way. ages old. Mars, Mercury, Sun. Does she live in my 12th house? the house of dreams, a bread crumb trail to my life? Is she the reason I walk away from the Big Things before they reach fruition? Love, Success, More. I toe the line, but she won't have it. I tell myself maybe I am a coward, she disagrees. What does it matter, she shrugs, and then smiles a toothless old grin. She alerts me to this habit of overfeeding and starving. The paradox of it. Why does it even exist? I ask, exasperated? Why can't it be easy, for all of us? Not just me, but for the woman collecting cans, for the man in the grocery store, his aloneness, her survival. Why can't we just take what we dream and beyond that not feel ambivalent or guilty?

Unfriendly planetary energies, he says. An opposition or a square. A lack of harmony, a thing to be untangled. For your own growth. Like the red drawstring collar on a peasant shirt accidentally thrown into the wash. An afternoon with a needle attempting to untangle it. At starts patient and irritated. The compulsion to throw the shirt away. To break things in anger. I don't like your system, I want to scream, at him, at her. I want to show them the mouse in the bottle of olive oil and shame them for believing that this is how it should be. or accepting that this is how it is.

They both shrug. Throwing the shirt away is your choice. It's your compromise. And we didn't make up these rules. But we advise that you live by them. Or don't.

But I can't live by them. And I am trapped in this body, in my thoughts, in the glass green bottle of my past and my future. And I don't feel like I am approaching any sort of end because I should be better at this by now, shouldn't I? if I've done it so many times. If this were a real life shouldn't I have been given some sort of instruction on where to go and how to live? And I don't have the right words to express it or the right tools to live it. Like learning how to write letters and numbers, my hands uncomfortably gripping a pencil for the first time, the outstretched appendages of my 3 attempting to hit each of the three lines properly. I was weary, even then. Can't I start at a different place, next time? Can't I be born 44 or go back and redo high school? Can't I be like the Aymara and see my future behind me and my past in front of me? Aren't you just as tired of this as I am?

Why am I the only Pinko in this office? Why am I the only one talking in a loud voice about how much this place sucks, trying to get fired? And for that matter, why won't anyone just fire me already?


south node conjuncts mars, explosion, passion, karma, endings.

She sighs. Don't think your desires your exasperation your rage your questions your ideals your hopes are any different than anyone elses she says. I sigh. I want to believe I am terminally unique, but maybe I am not. None of it is a reason to compromise, she says. Do i have a choice? I ask. not really. She says. And so we are both resigned and weary. She is always right. She is my mother telling me to join literary magazine. The recongnition like an alarm clock. I told her a long time ago to remind me.

Venus conjunction Uranus, November and December, then march, then November and December again.

Unexpected encounters, but don't expect a resolution, just yet.

When will the resolution come, I ask?

2011. he says. I laugh at how concrete this answer is. See? I say to her. he gives me real answers. She laughs. I could have given you those a long time ago, she says. For a lot cheaper.