Written in the Stars

I should have known better. But things between me and Hugo were meant to be. It was predestined. Written in the stars. All of our friends said we were the perfect couple. Then, after we had already moved in together and he had asked me to marry him, he blindsided me with a confession that rocked my world forever.

Let me back up.

I met Hugo two years ago at the Ballard farmers market. He was wearing a blue jacket and holding an heirloom tomato, looking at it like it was asking a question he couldn’t answer, and when he looked up at me, I felt the whole crowded market go quiet.

Two years later, Hugo proposed at that same farmers market, on one knee, next to the tomatoes, and I said yes before he finished the sentence, because I already knew the ending. I’d known it for two years.

Which brings us to the dinner.

We were out celebrating our engagement, splitting a bottle of prosecco and discussing wedding plans – venues, colors, whether his mother could be trusted with a toast – when the conversation turned, as they often do when you’re discussing the merging of two lives, to our medical histories.

“I’m current on my vaccines,” I said.

“Vaccines don’t work,” he blurted.

Yes. He really said that. As a public health professional, I was insulted. As a student of biology, suddenly my word, my expertise, my entire shared body of knowledge, was being discredited by something Hugo had read in a meme on Facebook.

Vaccines don’t work. The lamp that illuminated our booth seemed to dim in that moment, like lost hope.

I scoffed. “What evidence do you have to support your claim, Hugo?” I asked him, slapping my hand on the table out of frustration, for one, but also to emphasize the pertinence of the question.

“Well,” he began, “look at all the people who still get sick.”

“And how do you know their vaccination status, Hugo? Unvaccinated people are more likely to get sick, and to be sick longer, with worse symptoms.”

“You can tell who’s vaccinated just by looking at them.”

“Seriously. What does a vaccinated person look like?”

Hugo paused, visibly thinking about how to answer. “They look like liberals. Blue hair and the whole bit. And they still get sick all the time!”

“Hugo.” My head lilted a bit to the side, to show disappointment. “What am I? You know my background. You know I have multiple degrees. You know what I do for a living. Do you honestly think I’m going to agree with you about this?”

“Well, yeah, I know you’re not a liberal. You’re MAGA like me. That’s who you are, my love.”

“You’re MAGA?” My eyes went wide as I launched, unconsciously, against the back of the booth. The question was rhetorical. It had become clear in that moment that Hugo and I were headed for a breakup over this. “How did I not know this before today?”

“You betcha! All true patriots are. And I am a true patriot. You’ve seen my gun collection, Kev. Patriotism is measured by the Glock.”

I pressed my forehead against my open palm. It was just getting worse. “Hugo. Jeeeeeeff. Hugo Hugo Hugo Hugo Hugo. Holy fuck, dude.”

He chuckled. Almost mockingly. He always had the cutest chuckle, but now it was just getting annoying. “What, Jon? I thought you were MAGA, too.”

“What on Earth would make you think that? And why the fuck are you MAGA? You’re GAY for fuck’s sake!”

“I might love men,” he said, “but I also love my country. And the Communist party doesn’t.”

I let out an audible sigh. “Hugo. Shit, babe.” I started to gather my things from the booth and get up to leave.

He didn’t try to stop me. That’s the part that stung most. He just sat there with his prosecco and his “patriotism” and watched me wrestle my coat out from the seat.

When I finally stood up, he said, “Calm down, hon. You’re really going to feel silly about this tomorrow.”

I told him — loudly enough that the couple in the next booth stopped chewing — that the only thing I felt silly about was wasting two years of my youth on a man who got his immunology degree from a cartoon frog. Then I walked out into the parking lot and sat in the car trying not cry. The future I had envisioned evaporated from my eyes together with the drying tears.

Evidence isn’t just one data point. Any scientist will tell you that. One bad dinner is an anecdote. Two years of compatibility is a data set. And a discovering incompatibility is yet another data point.

I sat in my car in the parking lot, hands shaking, and I opened my horoscope app, because it was almost midnight and my daily reading refreshes at midnight and I just… I just needed to see it. I needed one more data point.

At 12:00 a.m. exactly, it loaded.

Mercury’s shadow falls across the house of partnership. A loved one will speak against your deepest beliefs. Do not mistake the eclipse for the sun’s absence. What Venus has built, no argument can unbuild. Forgive.

I read it four times.

A loved one will speak against your deepest beliefs? I mean. Come on.

I called Madame Celestine, the psychic I’d been seeing. She picks up for me at any hour; that’s the level of relationship we have. I told her everything. I told her about the vaccines, the blue hair comment, the frog. She listened the way she does, breathing audibly, and then she said, “Jon. Sweetheart. What did I tell you two years ago?”

“That he would change my life.”

“Did I say he would agree with you?”

She had not. I checked my notes from the session. Yes… I take notes. I’m a scientist.

“Sagittarius’ fire,” Madam Celeste said, “burns loud but not deep. He tests you because Mercury is in retrograde. When Venus enters your seventh house in June, none of this will matter. The cards have never once been wrong about you two. Has anything I’ve told you ever been wrong?”

It hadn’t. Not the blue jacket, not the water, not the promotion at work she predicted in 2024 that came only four months later than foretold, which she’d warned me might happen because of the eclipse. You can’t argue with a track record like hers. I certainly wasn’t going to throw out a two-year longitudinal study over one outlier. That’s not how science works.

I hung up the phone with Madam Celeste, collected myself, and went back inside.

Hugo was still in the booth. He had ordered a lava cake with two spoons, because he knew. Of course he knew. We’re a once-in-a-generation match; we always know.

I slid in across from him, and he pushed a spoon toward me, and neither of us said sorry.

*****

People ask me – my sister asks me, my coworkers at the health department ask me, my whole cohort from Advanced Epidemiology has asked me – how a man of science could marry a man who doesn’t believe in vaccines.

“It’s an evidence-based decision,” I tell them.

The wedding is in June, when Venus enters my seventh house. Madame Celestine helped me pick the date. Hugo has agreed not to talk politics at the reception, and I’ve agreed not to fact-check his toast.

Last winter we both caught the flu. Both of us. I was fully vaccinated. He, proudly not. Hugo said that the fact we both got sick was proof that vaccines don’t work. And for one bad feverish night, staring at the ceiling while he snored like a congested patriot beside me, I almost let it rattle me until I remembered that the flu shot’s effectiveness varies by season, that a sample size of two proves nothing, and that my horoscope had, in fact, flagged the entire week for “shared vulnerability.” Which, if you think about it, is a documented prediction of viral transmission within the household.

I should have known better. I did know better. And I did it anyway. The stars had ordained it.