Celestial Complications

There was a guy I knew two jobs back who liked to guess coworkers' zodiac signs. He was good, too. Pinned three other members of the team without a second shot at any of them. I guessed he was an Aquarius; he was a late Capricorn. He was better than I was for sure.

"But what about you, boss?" he said one night, leaning on my desk between calls. We'd been peers once, but since he'd been moved onto my team after getting himself demoted I was "boss", despite being five years his junior. "I can't quite get you figured out."

"You won't."

"Why not?"

"I don't have one."

He laughed. "You can't just not have one. I get it if you don't believe in it but..."

"Nah. I don't have one." I was sure. I'd sat with this concept for a long time. I'd struggled with what I'd been told my sign was. I'd come to understand why it never felt right. "Just don't."

"When were you born?"

I looked up from the payroll spreadsheet. "March 20th, 1988. Spring equinox that year. Three past noon on the last Sunday of Lent. A day between seasons, between weeks, between liturgical cycles, and, astrologically, between years." I'd said it before, babbling my own mythos quietly at the mirror in my early twenties. "In a room that wasn't a room, too. Hospital was full. They put a bed in the storage room."

"Noon on the equinox?" He appeared at a loss.

"Yep. Not a Pisces or an Aries."

On the other side of the spine of cubicles, the red-haired TMNT fan with anger problems popped up. "That doesn't mean you're neither. It means you're both. It's called a cusp rider. I'm surprised you don't know this, being...." He trailed off with a vague wave directed, I believe, at my spiritual beliefs.

"I never really got into astrology."

That was true. I like divination. I like what our guesses at coincidence tell us about our hopes and fears. I'm decent at tarot and getting better at runes. I was interested in palmistry but never pursued it; you have to look at a lot of hands to develop the skill and I don't have a lot of the kind of relationships where someone will let you closely inspect a body part. Astrology, though, had always been the one hard stop for me.

Back in the nineties a lot of us learned our sign by looking at the horoscopes section of the newspaper, right above the Jumble and next to Garfield. Most readings put March 20th as a date for Pisces, a few put it as a date for Aries, and not a single one ever took into account that the stars move. No one ever mentioned that what exact date the signs turned over changed from year to year. No one ever mentioned that they don't flip like a switch, that they flow into one another like colors on a tacky college dorm room lamp. No one mentioned the cusps.

So, all my life, I'd been a badly-fitting Pisces. Yeah, I spent most of my years before eighteen writing, being a hopeless romantic, and having tearful public meltdowns over what was in retrospect goddamn NOTHING. While I passed as a Pisces to observers, though, I knew my terrible secret: none of it came from a place of softness. I wasn't sad because I was compassionate and hurting for others. I was angry. I was angry as hell all the time. My own mother used to introduce me as "mean as a snake". I had a wild streak, not in the "does foolish, immature garbage" sense but in the sense that I would not be calmed. I had no step between Fine and Inconsolable. Pisces is the dreamer; I was a nightmare.

What do you do with something that fits that poorly?

You throw it away. By adulthood, I was long done with astrology.

Fast forward to me, twenty-seven, Googling "cusp rider" in the middle of an overnight shift with no calls coming in.

The idea is this: as one approaches the moment when the sun moves from one sign to the next, the people born around that time take on a sort of blend of the two signs. If you're born the day of transition it's an even blend, if you're born up one to three days on either side it's balanced more in the favor of the sign of the side you're on. You're on the edge, dancing between two identities. In addition to the twelve signs, there are twelve cusps: Power, Energy, Magic, Oscillation, Exposure, Beauty, Drama, Revolution, Prophecy, Mystery, Sensitivity, and...Rebirth.

The Cusp of Rebirth. The moment between Pisces and Aries, ball-drop, the first breath. Neither water nor fire--boiling steam, deadly when pressurized. The dreamer who doesn't have the patience to not also be the doer. All the heart of Pisces, all the energy of Aries.

Now this, I thought, was something. This sounded right. A sign for the unstoppable force, for the fighter swaying but standing in round seven.

For the person who'd given birth junior year and still gotten their BA before they were 23.

Who had ditched an abusive spouse and married their best friend.

Who had left a religion that had been used to keep them prisoner and found freedom in a new one.

Who had three living children to show for six pregnancies.

Who had survived five years of PTSD before even being diagnosed.

Who had known what they were at age 9, but learned the word "agender" at 27.

As someone whose life could be summed up as "Ah, shit, let me try that bit again", this was the sign for me. It added in all the parts that had been missing. It smoothed out the inconsistencies. Suddenly, astrology was back on the menu. Time for more research.

I never came at it head-on, though. I picked at the edges of it for a few years. I think I was afraid. I think I knew deep down what would happen if I looked more into this new identity: if I looked too closely at the one thing that ever really fit, I’d see the unserged seams and cheap fabric. That's where it always falls through, isn't it? When you actually start to look at things closely?

You see--and here's the volta that neither of us were expecting--cusp theory is technically impossible.

It's not like these signs are just names for these periods of time. They correspond to actual segments of the ecliptic, the plane of Earth's orbit around the sun. In order for you to have two signs or parts of two signs, the sun would physically have to be in two different places at once--something which, despite our 8.5-minute perceptual delay, it simply cannot do. If you run a proper natal chart using your time of birth, you only get one sun sign.

I've finally did one. 12:03pm, March 20th, 1988. I'm an Aries. Simple enough, right?

Of course not.

My sun is in Aries. My moon is in Taurus, as are Venus and Jupiter. Mars, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are all in Capricorn. Pluto is in Scorpio, Lilith is in Leo, and Pisces finally shows up with both Mercury and the North Node. My rising sign is, of all things, Cancer.

You see, I was right about one thing: I wasn't just one thing. None of us are. We like to categorize people in one of these twelve little buckets because it's easy. It gives us a quick overview, and sometimes it's more accurate than others. It's a lot like buying a wedding dress off the rack, though: if you want it to fit properly, you're going to have to have it tailored to fit.

I was told my sign was Pisces, then the Cusp of Rebirth, then Aries. So, what is it really?

This.