Mercury in Cancer

Perception here works sideways. Before the words of a statement register, this mind has taken the temperature of the person saying it, and that reading is treated as the more reliable data. It is usually right about people and frequently wrong about facts, since a remembered feeling will overrule a written figure. Such a person can walk into a house and know what happened there that morning. They can also spend a week convinced of something because of the tone in which it was first said to them.

Speech is indirect and often circles the point rather than landing on it, particularly when the point is uncomfortable. Requests are implied. Objections come as a story about someone else who had a similar problem. In an argument this mind does not attack the position; it withdraws behind it, going quiet in a way that carries more weight than any rebuttal. Old grievances are stored intact, with the exact wording preserved, and can be produced years later to the genuine astonishment of everyone else present.

Learning attaches to circumstance. What was studied at the kitchen table with rain outside is remembered along with the rain, and the two cannot be separated. This makes for wonderful recall of anything with emotional weight and poor recall of anything neutral. Journals are kept and old letters are not thrown away. The real difficulty is protective rather than intellectual: a mind this permeable takes on the anxiety in a room and mistakes it for its own thinking, and needs a quiet house to find out what it actually thinks.