Member-only story
Balancing Act
The stars may not always align the way we like.
Libra Starring as The Peacemaker
You remember it like a bruise, the way the tension would spike in your chest at the first hint of your mother’s anger. Her words were like cut glass, so easy to make you bleed at the wrong moments, when you were just a caterpillar struggling to free itself from its cocoon.
It was worse when your father yelled: exhaustion and desperation were the undertones coloring his every word. Sometimes a door would slam, jolting you out of your carefully curated safe space. Sometimes the fury would flow away like a tide from the shore. And sometimes, as if by chance, you would stand in the middle and try to appease from both sides — often a losing game in and of itself.
When they call you “Switzerland” now, with every cracked word or heightened moment, you smile away the truth. It’s so much easier to pretend you simply are than to explain why your first reaction to strife is to try and turn down the flame on everyone’s internal gas ovens.
You would rather be the pacifist than just another soldier ready to arm up and move out for the coming war between personas.
