A Look at the Year Ahead…
Congratulations, Gemini, you’ve made it through to another year—and what a year you’ve just waded through. As we begin a new cycle around the sun and Saturn begins its descent through the sector of your chart that rules closure and transformation, try to leave last year’s loose ends behind. What the stars have in store for you this year requires focus and vulnerability.
Grief is arduous, unmoored, unending—after the months you’ve just waded through, you know that better than anyone—but try to reframe the heartache by holding space for the grief of others. Pay close attention to what your loved ones are telling you this year; they may be sending vital signals that you are missing.
January
Do you feel that?
Pluto is due to circle through Libra on the second and, although the snow is still falling outside, you will feel like a tree in spring: winter’s end is in sight and it’s finally time to let your flowers bloom. An exciting opportunity for growth and transformation will emerge as the new year begins and, with it, the realization that you must change your outdated ways of seeing the world. You must wear new lenses that will allow once overlooked nuances to reveal themselves to you.
Gifts will help mend neglected relationships as Jupiter enters Cancer in your fourth house; now is an ample opportunity to take your child out to relieve yourself of the guilt you have felt lately when looking at her round face and unbrushed hair. Now is the perfect time to realize you are all she has left now. Take her shopping, buy her whatever she sets her moonstruck eyes on. Hold her hand as you try to hurry past the bric-a-brac vendor in the market with a scar running over one eye that you try to not look directly into. Sigh as your child releases your damp hand and toddles over to a black oak-mounted mirror at the side of the vendor’s stall. Roll your eyes when she gazes dreamily into her own milky reflection, clammy hands grasping either side of the intricately carved frame, and begs you to buy it for the empty wall in her bedroom. Don’t make eye contact with the leering vendor as you hand over the money.
February
At the start of this month, Mercury is due to reverse into your domestic fourth house, bringing tension closer to home. Don’t let any changes in your family’s behavior be the source of unnecessary worry or upset. Remember that grief affects us all in wildly different ways: where you choose to stay home and slowly rot from within, your daughter may choose to open herself up and expand her social reach.
Having said that, do pay attention to the people your loved ones have chosen to allow access into their lives. The energy they bring, be that restorative or destructive, will undoubtedly affect the domestic balance you’ve been working so hard to restore.
The new year wants you to cultivate openness and vulnerability: Saturn will be by your side, restoring some much-needed tolerance. Your daughter speaks often about a new friend, and you quietly wonder when she had time to meet someone new since her father’s illness led to her being pulled out of school at the end of last year. Remember, though: an open mind equals an open heart.
March
Your child’s new, nameless friend will start to unsettle you this month: this in and of itself may be concerning as it is not in your easy-going nature to worry, dear Gemini. Ask, with all the kindness and benevolence a mother can give, to meet your daughter’s friend. Try to contain your frustration when your daughter refuses to let you near him.
Jealousy is a tough and complex emotion with many false roots, and it can be difficult to accept that a loved one is no longer as dependent on you as they once were. Use this as an opportunity to evaluate why it angers you to see her lean on someone else’s shoulder for a change.
Be wary of the mirror in your daughter’s bedroom. Pay close attention to your peripheries when you are near it.
April
It will now be getting increasingly difficult to ignore the overarching feeling of paranoia that has crept into your domestic fourth house. With Mercury once again entering its dreaded retrograde midway through the month, you have until the 15th to sort out any personal and home matters that may have recently become chaotic and confusing. Subtlety is key here, Gemini, though we all know that it isn’t your forte.
Curiosity will be bound to get the better of you, and the questions you ask that began as minor, inconsequential attempts to grow closer to your loved ones will quickly expose themselves as the paranoid delusions that they are.
All the same, keep an eye out for those whose behavior has worsened lately. Challenge your daughter when she speaks to you with a sudden apathy and moroseness from behind the slick, steaming roast chicken in the centre of the dinner table on a Sunday evening. Question her when you peek through her bedroom door keyhole and see her talking to thin, empty air. Yell at her when you see orange flames writhing over haphazardly placed logs in the fireplace on the far side of her room and don’t listen when she insists it wasn’t her that lit it.
Don’t be surprised when she pulls away from you further, Gemini. She knows you don’t understand; she knows you never have.
May
Early on this month, the summer skies will bruise as energizing Mars slams the brakes for a two-month retrograde. It is likely that growing tensions will reach breaking point this month. Be prepared for some intense domestic combustion; this challenging cycle could bring unexpected outbursts, fights, and erratic behavior if you don’t pull yourself together.
Watch your daughter closely. Begin to realize that not everyone—and certainly not everything—has good intentions.
Despite your best efforts, your daughter will continue to garble on for hours to dead air in the dim light of her room. She talks as if she is responding to someone, she nods as if she understands what they tell her.
With the red-blooded planet off-course, it will be easy to self-combust when your daughter grows more recluse and aggressive as days go by. Watch that you don’t come on too strong—surrender, dear Gemini, and listen to the heavens for once instead of forcing your agenda.
June
Count the days as your daughter gets worse, pull strands—and then chunks—of hair from your head as the weeks pass and her hostility grows, tally the sleepless nights as you lie awake listening to her scream and babble in a language you don’t understand. Some nights, you will hear another voice, low and coarse, seeping from your daughter’s room. It will sound familiar in a way you will struggle to place, but don’t be afraid of it. It may bring a necessary—though surprising—change into your life.
July
It will be easy to get lost in circular thinking and unrequited desires this month; what could have been this year, had you just made a few different choices? What should have happened that somehow didn’t? What is going to happen that you so easily could have protected your family from?
Try to find a way to see things in a new light. Luckily for you, August is usually a perfect time of year for overdue realizations to come to light:
Your daughter is no longer here and there is something else in her place.
Her room smells of rot. She stalks you around the house. She no longer eats, so you will soon have stopped making food for her. When she speaks, which is not often and never to you anymore, it is the devil’s voice that unfurls from her cracked lips. She watches you while you sleep, grinning with yellowed teeth.
You will think about calling a doctor, but you never do. There are no numbers for exorcists that you can find in the Yellow Pages. Besides, you will tell yourself, ghosts aren’t real.
August
Poor, dear Gemini. The last month of summer will see Jupiter fall through your sixth, health-oriented house, although you may have felt this coming for a while now. Eclipse season will also begin alongside the planetary shift, both of which, unfortunately for you, means more curveballs are being pitched as we speak.
Wake up one night in the middle of the month to find your daughter collapsed and unresponsive on the kitchen linoleum, her eyes lolling into the back of her head. She groans, gutturally and without breath. Call the hospital, drive frantically behind the ambulance’s red-blue streaks blinking against the scattered rain and grey night sky. Watch with tears blurring your vision as your daughter is restrained against her will to a white bed arranged neatly underneath humming fluorescent lights. Wince as she screams, hot and piercing, louder than you have ever heard it before, and catch your breath as she finally loses consciousness.
This will be the first time you have seen your daughter asleep in months. Relish it. Hold her cool, limp hand. Pray.
September
Pay attention to what surrounds you this month; many things will require you to adapt. Remember that only those who adapt will survive.
By the end of the month, you will have stopped visiting your daughter’s still, languid, body altogether. You will tell yourself it’s because you hate to see her like this, but, really, you can’t stand the smell. No one else will seem to register it but, to you, it will be difficult to endure the overwhelming stench for more than a few minutes. When the smell starts to follow you home, you will not be able to recall when it started. Soon you will think it has been there your entire life.
Noises from the attic will wake you from an already broken sleep. You will be plagued with nightmares, some involving your daughter, some involving a horde of strange and vile creatures, most involving both. Don’t look too hard at the deep, black scratches that will appear on the upstairs hallway walls between your bedroom and your daughter’s.
The noises will gradually bleed from the attic and into the walls. You will begin to wake most mornings in your daughter’s bed, though you will have no memory of going there.
Neptune, ruling planet of dreams and illusions, will make an appearance in your first house in the latter half of this month, and this may affect your grasp on your identity. It is likely that you will doubt yourself, your past actions, even your current reality. Try to stay grounded. Take heed of what is really here. The rest is unimportant.
The night that you are woken by your daughter’s singing—a sound you have not heard in months now—drifting from her bedroom, open her door to find a dark figure standing in the mirror. The room itself will of course be empty, and the singing will have stopped. You will not recognize the figure. You will think you are dreaming.
Peer into the mirror as the Mirror Man peers into you. Reach out; touch the milky surface, frosted with a thin layer of dust. The figure will do the same. Lose consciousness as your fingers meet.
October
We hate to break it to you, Gemini, but Mars is due to start its dreaded descent into your sixth house this month, whilst Neptune continues to spiral deeper through Libra. It might be challenging to keep a handle on things, and it is likely that you will see a decline in both your physical and mental health. Take it one step at a time: remember, you can’t give more than you have.
You will likely have abandoned your bedroom and taken to sleeping only in your daughter’s, where, it will feel to you, time runs at a different pace. Be prepared for flu-like headaches, sharp abdominal pains, and debilitating fever. You will stop eating. Somehow, you hardly get hungry. The few times you do, you will take an unexpected pleasure in the various creatures that wander out of the forgotten redbrick fireplace—unlit since June—on the far side of the room: spiders and other insects, the odd rat or squirrel. You will lose chunks of time—stolen, you will think, by the Mirror Man. He will watch you as you sleep. He will talk to you as you dream. Fear not, Gemini: you are sick, and the Mirror Man will heal you.
November
It is a sad and unfortunate fact of life that, while some people walk alongside us to the very end, most serve their purpose in our lives and eventually take their own path—often towards their grave. Allow things to unfold as they should; don’t fight what is destined to be.
It may be hard to accept that your daughter, finally stiff and cold where she lays wrapped in bleached linen under the fluorescent tube lights of her hospital room, has given in. As the fog melts into the grey sheets of snow under the streetlights outside your house, trust that everything has its place. Trust that you will be shown the meaning of such heartache soon. Understand that your daughter was not strong enough for what is to come.
You will not visit your daughter’s body; you will refuse to answer the phone calls that begin to pour in. They will cremate your daughter in a small, contained blaze and mail you the rubble afterwards. You will not cry. The Mirror Man will look upon you softly. He will whisper into you and tell you, finally, that his name is Avnas.
December
Imagine yourself floating out to sea on a life raft or dinghy: if you try to swim against the tides, that will be exactly where you feel the most resistance, and that is where you will be most in danger.
The easiest thing to do is to surrender, fully and without apprehension, to the powers that have guided you this year. Allow them to fill the gaping space that has been emptied by your grief. The vulnerability you have cultivated this year will help; give into it, like a corpse, drowned by the river’s current, being swept downstream.
Spend your days gazing into the mirror. You will lose all sense of time: begin to wonder why it even mattered to begin with. Avnas will thank you for the sacrifices you have made. All of it pays off this month, sweet Gemini: think of yourself as a snake shedding its skin; a moth free from its cocoon, transfigured and drawn to the flame.
No one understands that true transformation is slow but inexorable better than you—be sure to welcome it.
Avnas smiles upon you.
New Year’s Day, 3:31am, January 2024
Some are afraid of chaos, the undefined, the unknown: you are not among them. You are a master of the indeterminate because you know—after the year you’ve had—that surprising things can come from disarray.
Allow your eyes to adjust to the darkness last year brought. So much has been taken from you; you have suffered so much grief, so much misery. Trust that all things are aligned as they should be, trust that it is nearly your time to dance in the flames.
You will not remember how the fire started.
The picture of you and your daughter pumpkin-picking last Autumn, framed above the fireplace in your daughter’s bedroom, will be the first to be swallowed by the blaze. You will watch the flames lick the marbled corners and melt the plexiglass protector, blackening the edges of the picture slowly and then all at once until your static, smiling faces are lost.
As the house that bears so many of your memories crumbles and blazes around you, you stand on the once-pink rug in the center of the room and stare into the mirror you bought almost a year ago. Your eyes, clouded and vapid, look like milky cataracts. Your face is gaunt. You are naked and your skin peels back in slivers, like potato slices in hot oil, uncovering the raw, red muscle and scored tissue underneath. You will smile, catching a semi-opaque glimpse of a face that isn’t yours pasted over your own, like a double-exposed photo. The face smiles back at you.
