I Read the Full Moon Thing Twice 🌑

The first date went fine right up until the part where he said it.

We were talking about the bridge traffic, or his brother's boat, I don't remember which, and he leaned back in the booth and said, cheerful, that he hoped I wasn't the type who believed in horoscopes. I laughed. What else do you do. Then he told me about a girlfriend he had who read the newspaper one, the printed horoscope column, in the actual paper, like it was 1994.

Fine.

I knew his sign before I knew his last name. I want that on the record. I did the thing where you type a birth date into your phone right there at the table with your coat still on, next to a basket of breadsticks you are not going to eat.

The app sent me a notification. Saturn, opposition, something. A little ring of planets spun on my screen while he was telling me about the boat, it was extremely unhelpful, and I watched all of it with my glass of water in my hand.

Here is the thing about horoscopes. Nobody believes in them and everybody knows your moon sign. I have watched this happen in real time. A guy at a party tells me he doesn't believe in astrology, and then five minutes later he wants to know what time I was born, because apparently that is a different question.

Nobody will say it out loud. It is a closed club and the dress code is denial.

But I looked it up, and his sign and mine came out fine. The app gave me a number. I don't remember the number. I remember that my shoulders came down about a quarter inch, standing in the restaurant, over the breadstick I never touched, and that my body did that without asking me first.

And then I sat back down and did the math on whether he had done the same thing, and he had, because nobody asks that question cold. "I hope you're not into horoscopes" is not something you say when you have not looked. You say it when you ran the numbers and got a result you liked and cannot admit you ran. He was not asking about my spirituality. He was asking if I was going to check.

He also asked it in a way that was very sweet and slightly embarrassed, with a little crinkle at the corner of his eye, so I gave him the answer he wanted, which was that I think the twelve signs are a lot of pressure on twelve people, and he said "thank god," and we split the check even though I did not eat the breadstick.

Then, at a party last month, a friend of mine said his new girlfriend was a Virgo and made that face. I said, what, you don't believe in that. He said, I never said I didn't believe in it. I said, you literally told me horoscopes are not real science. He said, I never said that either, and then he got defensive and said his mom was a Pisces, which is not a thing I would have chosen to know.

The app is still on my phone. I have not deleted it. Tuesday it told me there would be a full moon and that something in my chart was "releasing," and I read the whole thing in bed at one in the morning with the brightness turned down, and then I turned the brightness up and read it again.

I did not tell him about any of it. Not the percentage. Not the shoulders.