By Kaamilah Ali

For matters of the heart, look to Venus: the planet of love, harmony, and seduction.

Absolute magnetism. Your Venus is in Leo, and most of your memories are hazy but that’s the one part you can’t forget: faces centimeters apart, inching closer, daring one another without words. You don’t know how it happened. You can only speculate you moved in first and him next. Suddenly, you’re retreating into each other, biting lips and running fingers through hair. It’s the kind of kiss you smile through. You wish you could remember it better, but you don’t. You do, however, remember every second that led up to it.

It's never about the kiss. It’s never about the moment that your lips actually touch; it’s always about the rush around it, the seconds before, the seconds after, the borderline. How thrilling it is to almost kiss — how thrilling it is to pull away from a kiss and smile at each other like you’re sharing your favorite secret.

You remember leaning back against the brick wall of the bar you’ve spent too much time in and grabbing a fistful of fabric and a handful of hair: the boldest you’ve been in months.

A couple of glasses of something that burns on its way down and suddenly you’re someone else entirely. You’re batting eyelashes and flittering about, flashing that one smile, making that one face until you get what you want. You forget to be shy. You start imagining elevator rides you could take with strangers full of tension and restraint that would pour out into your too-long hallway, through your doorway, and down onto your mattress. You could lean against walls forever, having the most fascinating conversations about nothing because on the nights where you want to be, you are the most interesting girl in the world.


You worry you don't fall in love with people. Instead, you fall in love with conversations, with moments. You think life should feel like a movie, every second brimming with climax and cinema. Mundanity should be punctuated by romance and in between the big moments, life should blur together like a montage. Wayward fantasies eat away at you while you’re supposed to be participating in the real world. Maybe it’s wrong to fantasize about perfect strangers but it's a lot more fun — a lot less painful than fantasizing about anything with the potential to become real.

You look for answers in the stars and they tell you it's because your Venus is in Leo. Venus is the planet that rules love, beauty, and romance. It sits in your eleventh house in the sign of Leo: proud, willful, and affectionate.

The stars whisper that you live for all-consuming passion. The planetary alignments at the time of your birth have destined you to search for reminders of your beauty and decorate yourself with a love that is a vehicle for vanity. You long to be center stage, but you cannot carry a tune and lack the poise of a dancer, so instead you perform in love. It’s all an act. The world is your stage, any man your audience. It’s all a performance and the prize is to be wanted.

It's no wonder you fall in love with strangers not because of who they are but rather who you become when you’re with them. For a few moments, you get to fall in love with yourself, looking through the eyes of another. It’s a hard feeling to put into exact words. As you let yourself trace back through the memories, allow the rapid succession of flashbacks to rush in, you see yourself as you truly want to be: the object of desire.

It’s never about your suitor. It’s about the way they look at you that keeps you suspended, spinning helplessly in circles like a ballerina in a jewelry box. It’s an addictive kind of voyeurism to witness someone looking at you like you could be everything and anything they need. To watch someone worship at your altar feels like worshiping at your own. If they look away, if their gaze is broken, then you’re a ballerina dancing for no one. The mirror in the jewelry box cracks and you're left staring at your fractured reflection. They don’t know that the performance you put on is not for their benefit but for your own. They are simply looking glass: a reminder that you are beautiful, wanted, needed and desired.

Your Venus is in Leo, so if for just a moment, someone can make you feel like the girl in a movie, stared down at with hungry desperate eyes, you’ll chase that feeling to the ends of the earth. You’ll fall in love for the night, and a little piece of you will fall in love forever. 


That little piece is what stirs up trouble. When there are no more flirtatious dance floor glances or sheepish almost-kisses, it becomes harder to let sleeping dogs lie, to let one fun night be just that. You want more to come from moments that don’t have much more to offer. You crave the rush, but more importantly, you crave the ravenous admiration which is your lifeline.

When the well of veneration dries up, you run yourself ragged chasing explanations for your fragile disposition. The horoscopes you frantically read with tear-stained cheeks only say that you hunger for worship. The planets and comets and stars, however they align, leave you fated to love someone for a night and grow bored between the nights you live for.

It’s during those in between nights that the wayward fantasies creep in. You dream only of lingering gazes, cheeky smiles, and staring at each other’s mouths while talking about nothing. You pray for dancing in between lips crashing together, being spun around in circles on the dance floor, and laughing at how stupid you probably look but how perfect you actually feel. But it sits out of reach.

Your Venus is in Leo and you're destined to spend your nights looking for mirrors in place of lovers. You can employ your grandiose stage presence in romance, your fine training in seduction. But at the end of the night, you’ll keep dancing for no one, in helpless spinning circles. ■