Gemini and so am I

The twins, two sides of a coin, two Queens on a playing card, one right side up and the other upside down. But which is which?

I’m a Gemini, and so am I.

I read one day that not everyone has another voice in their head, constantly chattering, asking questions and answering them, a running commentary, a loping, tripping, skipping never-ending stream of consciousness. So… what is in your head, then? Where are you if you are not in there talking to you?

No answer, just “You talk too much!”

Correction: I talk too much – for you.

For me this unwinding ball of thread of thought stops me from getting so lost that I lose my way back. I lose my way, but I can just keep following the thread back if I really need to. Though sometimes the tunnels branch off and off until I realize I unwound the whole spool and it’s just dragging behind me like a long tail. Then I run towards the light, run to get out of the cave, no longer caring to find the way back to where I came from, just needing to get out from underground.

Geminis crave the spotlight. And to be left alone.

They are in love with life, with love, they count a million stars and open their big eyes wider and wider just to take it all in, mind spinning just to talk it all in, to talk it into being, staying, to use words to build things into being real. And, of course, words to end it.

We have dreams but don’t remember them. Others that we remember in infinite detail, populated with characters from past, present, and future. Oracles of our own destiny, we predict our fate, then promptly forget. We forgive and forget, too, but not in that order. First we are furious, then distracted, we forget what we were so angry about. Something new flits by and takes our fancy. We forgive like rain, only because the drops become to heavy to hold onto.

When you are in a room with a Gemini, it feels more crowded. A road trip feels like a bus full of bustle even though you are a couple. You feel insecure and try to hold too tight because she is already in a relationship with herself. You are jealous. She thinks that means you like her but she’s like a water in the balloon of your relationship, the more you squeeze the more she feels like it will burst. When it does, you’ll be standing there soaking wet and she’ll have seeped out through the cracks in the floor.

Mercury is her metal, though her sign is air. A liquid metal shimmering and glimmering and useful and beautiful and poisonous, depending on what you do with it. Air seems so ethereal, weak even. Flimsy. Leaves blowing past on a whimsy.

But wind can carve stone, can change the shape of mountains. Wind can rip the roofs off of houses, pick up cars and buses, tear trees up by their roots. Or cool your sweaty brow with a small and gentle hand.

She weathers the pandemic by suddenly becoming a hermit, after so many years as a socialite. Then one day you see her in a crowd, panic behind the mask, she couldn’t take it anymore, had to see people. Only to disappear again for weeks on end.

She can’t cook. She’s an excellent cook. She can’t cook three times a day, seven days a week, year after year without sticking her head in the oven. She can’t talk again about what’s for dinner. But on a random Sunday, a brunch fit for a King (and two Queens). A dinner party out of nothing, pretty plates piled with tapas and tarts. Champagne in the bathtub, in the hot tub, bubbles upon bubbles.

I am not one of two. Neither is she. We are everything, one at a time. Like a kaleidoscope. All the colored crystals and beads and pieces shining, all there at once, waiting for the turn, the event that mixes them then stops, reflecting which one was created at that second from the external circumstances that shifted everything. One slight movement and it all changes again, now this pattern, now that. Beautiful, ugly, happy, sad, whole, splintered.

Once, she was quiet, still. She floated in the tropical ocean after midnight, and the sea was full of phosphorescent plankton, it sparkled around her, full of stars, mirroring the sky, so full of lights that it looked like salt crystals spilled across a black table. The temperature of the air is the same as that of the water. The plankton shimmer and glow around her, the stars shimmer and glow above her, the line between them blurs as her eyes fill with tears, just a drop in the ocean, it all becomes one, and the voices stop. There is silence. There is nothing and everything. And for one moment, all is one. She floats, suspended between the earth and sky, ocean and stars. All is one.

But of course, it’s not. The Universe is a Gemini. Above and below and all around. One, and the other. Light and dark, chiaroscuro, good and evil, right and wrong. Prose and song. There is no up without down. The Universe created consciousness so it could observe itself. Go look in the mirror. Look into your own eyes. Don’t move, don’t leave. Don’t be afraid. Just look into you. Look at you looking into you.

Now you are a Gemini, too.

And so are you.