Cancer, my creature. Come here. Sit on the side of the booth where you can see the door. I know. I always sit there too. April rain on the awning, the season hasn’t quite turned yet, and you can feel every change in pressure in your chest like the sky is using your ribcage as a barometer. Welcome to being a water sign in spring. Madonn’. I poured you tea. Not coffee. Not this week.
The Sun’s in Aries the front three weeks and the rest of the zodiac is on fire. Aries is loud and Aries is fast and you, sweet thing, are picking up everybody’s signal at once and trying to figure out which feeling is yours and which is the woman three tables over. The answer most days will be some of both. That’s not a bug. That’s the Cancer condition.
Week one — there’s a conversation in your head you have not had yet. I know it. I can feel you running it. You’ve already lost it twice and won it once and felt guilty about winning. Sweet thing. Say it out loud to the actual person before the forty-first rehearsal turns it mean. The other party is at home eating cereal. They have not thought about this in eleven hours. The longer you script it in your head, the further it gets from the truth and the closer it gets to a script. Speak it.
Week two is for the home. Your house is the holding, not the square footage — and the holding is feeling a little ragged. Light a candle. Make the soup. Wash the sheets. Move one piece of furniture three inches to remind yourself the room is yours. Saint Brigid for the hearth — light her on a Sunday by the stove. Cancer with a tended home is Cancer with a tended nervous system. The two are wired together. Tend.
Mid-April, the family thing is gonna come up. The mother thing. The sibling thing. The cousin who said the thing in 2003 that nobody else remembers but you do. Madonn’, my child. You don’t have to resolve all of it in April. You have to name one piece of it — to yourself, in writing, in a journal nobody reads. Just name it. “This is what’s heavy. This is why.” That’s the whole prayer for week three. You don’t even have to do anything about it. Naming it lowers the temperature.
Late April, somebody’s gonna show up needing something from you. Your time, your kitchen, your couch, your patience. Your instinct is to give it without checking whether you have it to give. Sweetheart. Check. Cancer who gives from an empty well resents the person they gave to, and the person who took it had no idea the well was empty. Tell them what’s possible and what isn’t. Saint Anne for the long quiet labor of caring for somebody — but Saint Anne also wants you to not break yourself in the giving.
The new moon at the end of the month is in Taurus, in your house of stable foundations — meaning whatever you start in the days around it has root. Plant something small and slow. Not the dramatic life change. The small thing — the morning ritual, the standing weekly call with the one friend who actually picks up, the recurring Sunday soup. Cancer thrives on ritual the way other signs thrive on novelty. Build the ritual. It will hold you.
Light the candle, little saint. Make the soup. Call the one person who actually picks up. Saint Anne rides with you. Saint Brigid by the stove. The Moon is rooting for you. So am I. I love you. I’m not lying. I never lie about April.