I swear, I only started looking this up because of my cousin Mike. He’s always been one of those guys who thinks his Virgo sign explains every single stupid decision he’s ever made. The whole family was sitting at my aunt’s place last month, waiting for his wife to pop. She was due any day, and the argument started over what the kid’s sign would be.
The Initial Bet and My Total Screw-Up
Mike, the classic know-it-all, was convinced the kid was going to be a Taurus because his wife, bless her heart, is a hard-headed Leo, and he said the universe wouldn’t let them have another air sign. Which, first off, makes no sense, and second, I piped up, just wanting to look smart for once. I told him he was forgetting the whole thing starts with Aries, and Aries comes right after Pisces. I thought I was dropping some heavy knowledge on him.
He looked at me like I had three heads. “Dude, Pisces ends in March. You telling me we skip April and May? You’ve got the whole sequence screwed up, man.”
And you know what? He got in my head. I started running the calendar in my brain and suddenly, I couldn’t remember what came after Pisces. I knew the cycle had to restart, but the months just scrambled everything. I needed to actually write this whole thing down, from start to finish, to prove either him or myself wrong.
My Highly Scientific Note-Taking Process
I didn’t trust my phone. A quick Google search would just spit out the answer, and I wouldn’t actually learn it. I wanted to map out the damn sequence, the way I used to track things when I was a kid using a circular calendar. It had to be a personal practice, a full-circle loop, or it wouldn’t stick.
I grabbed a terrible, coffee-stained napkin from the kitchen table—the real tools of research, right?—and a cheap pen that was almost out of ink. I decided I was going to start the zodiac year from the traditional starting point, not January, because that always messes things up. I knew Aries was the Spring Equinox thing, the “first” sign.
- Aries (Mar 21 – Apr 19)
- Taurus (Apr 20 – May 20)
- Gemini (May 21 – Jun 20)
- Cancer (Jun 21 – Jul 22)
- Leo (Jul 23 – Aug 22)
- Virgo (Aug 23 – Sep 22)
I paused there because that already covered half the year, and I could feel my confidence building back up. See, I wasn’t totally crazy. The sequence was flowing.
Getting to Pisces and Closing the Loop
I kept going down the list, and this is where I needed to really pay attention to the transition:
- Libra (Sep 23 – Oct 22)
- Scorpio (Oct 23 – Nov 21)
- Sagittarius (Nov 22 – Dec 21)
- Capricorn (Dec 22 – Jan 19)
- Aquarius (Jan 20 – Feb 18)
- Pisces (Feb 19 – Mar 20)
Right. There it was. Pisces, sitting there at the very end of the cycle, ending just before the spring officially kicks off again. I traced my finger from the last date—March 20th—right back up to the top of my napkin list. Where did the sequence go? It had to immediately jump to the start of the next sign. Mike was arguing that I was skipping months, but I wasn’t skipping anything. That sign ends, the next one begins the next day.
It was simple, but I needed the tactile act of writing out all twelve to stop my brain from fighting with the calendar year. My whole internal struggle was because I kept trying to fit December 31st into the logic, which just doesn’t work for the zodiac.
So, what month is after Pisces? The end of March. And what sign starts then? The answer is Aries, beginning around March 21st, literally kicking off the whole shebang again. I didn’t need to ask Mike, I just needed to trust my own scratchy little record.
The Final Outcome
My final step in this little practice was to wait for the announcement. Mike’s wife had the baby six days later, on March 26th. I got the text: “It’s an Aries, you smug jerk.”
I just texted back a thumbs-up. The satisfaction wasn’t about being right; it was about the relief that my messy, napkin-scrawled process worked, and the cycle made sense again. Next time, I’ll skip the arguing and just pull out a napkin.
