Sexual Astrology – Chapter 3 – Gemini

Darryl was technically almost my patient, which is the first of several things about the Gemini chapter that I would rather not examine too closely.

He came into the cardiac unit on a Thursday with something that turned out to be nothing – a stress response presenting as arrhythmia, resolved in four hours, discharged with lifestyle recommendations he was already composing counterarguments to as I handed him the leaflet. He was mid-thirties, quick-eyed, the kind of person who reads everything in a room and processes it faster than most people read.

“Is this peer-reviewed?” he said about the leaflet.

“It’s a hospital information sheet,” I said.

“Right, but the evidence base- “

“You had a stress response,” I said. “The evidence base recommends sleeping and drinking less coffee.”

“That’s a simplification.”

“Darryl,” I said, “go home.”

He looked at me for a moment.

“Can I have your number?” he said.

He was not technically my patient. He was admitted to cardiac and I was, by the point of this conversation, handing him off. The ethical calculus was approximately fine. I gave him the number.

He texted before he reached the exit.

Gemini, I would discover, do not do things by half. He texted with the speed and volume of someone for whom communication was a primary sensory experience rather than a supplementary one. He asked questions and was genuinely interested in the answers but had frequently thought of three more questions by the time I finished answering the first. Our conversations had the quality of a tennis match played on several courts simultaneously.

His birthday was June 4th. He told me unprompted on our second date because he was telling me about a summer trip he had taken as a child.

Gemini. I had suspected by the second text.

We dated for three months.

The three months were, genuinely, fun – I want to give Darryl his due, because fun is underrated as a quality in another person and Darryl had it in abundance. He knew things about an impressive variety of subjects and had opinions about all of them and was open to revising his opinions in the face of evidence, which is rarer than it should be. He was good company. He made me laugh more frequently than anyone had in recent memory.

He also talked during sex.

I need to tell you about this with the clinical accuracy it requires, because talked does not quite convey the full picture. Darryl was not a man who occasionally said something in the heat of the moment. Darryl was a man for whom arousal and articulation were not separate states. He would be in the middle of something that was going quite well by any objective measure and he would say — not whisper, say, in his regular conversational voice – something about the angle or the technique or a related historical or anatomical observation.

The first time this happened I stopped completely.

“Are you lecturing me right now?”

“I’m providing context,” he said.

“Darryl.”

“It’s relevant.”

“To what?”

“To what I’m about to do,” he said, and then he did it, and it was relevant, and I was briefly too distracted to maintain my objections.

He was right about most things he said, which was the infuriating part. He kissed like it was a conversation he wanted to continue, long and thorough and with genuine interest in the response. Oral was a particular enthusiasm of his – given and received with the focused, curious attention of someone who had read everything on the subject and was pleased to apply theory to practice.

“Are you narrating?” I said at one point.

“Observation,” he said. “Your left- “

“Darryl.”

“Right,” he said. And went back to it.

The sex was, on balance, good. Varied and curious and enthusiastic, never mechanical, always slightly too much going on. He was genuinely interested in the full landscape of the thing – what worked, what almost worked, what might work with minor adjustment. He would have benefited from a research assistant and a grant.

We ended after three months not because of any particular event but because nothing was escalating – not between us as people, not in any direction that suggested the next stage. Darryl was fun and I liked him and there was no trajectory. He seemed to feel the same way. We had a final dinner and agreed, with the mild, amicable understanding of two people whose chapter was complete – and yes, I noticed the phrasing, I noticed immediately – that it had been a good three months.

He texted me an interesting article about cardiac nurse burnout the following week and I sent back a relevant study and this is still, occasionally, how we communicate.

I drove home from the last dinner and I sat in my car.

Aries. Taurus. Gemini.

March, April, May, June.

Sequential. In order. Without any particular intention.

I sat with this information for approximately four minutes.

Then I called my mother.

“Did you do something?” I said when she answered.

“Hello to you too,” she said.

“Did you do something. Astrologically. Did you put something somewhere or – I don’t know how your thing works, but – “

“What happened?”

I told her about the three signs in three months.

She was quiet for a moment.

“Sweetheart,” she said, “what you don’t believe in can’t affect you.”

“I don’t believe that’s how it works.”

“Exactly,” she said. “So you have nothing to worry about.”

I hung up.

I sat in the car.

I did not believe in astrology.

I was also going to find a Cancer on a dating app the following week, because if there was a pattern then the scientific thing to do was observe the pattern, and if there was no pattern then I would confirm the null hypothesis and feel better, and either way I was doing this for methodological reasons and not because my mother had done something I couldn’t explain.

I opened the app.

This is where it had started to feel less like coincidence and more like something I did not have the vocabulary for yet.

That was the part that bothered me.

I don’t believe in astrology.

I just matched with a Cancer anyway.