Super Star Love Day
By Hannah Felt Garner
The night that inaugurated my solid mid-20s relationship was, according to the astrologer I read at the time, a Super Star Love Day.
I had moved to New York that summer and was living in a pre-war three-bedroom apartment with friends of a friend—two cooler-than-me blondes who’d gone to Brown. One, small and brassy, was working for Bon Appétit. I would come home to find her frantically chopping shallots, oven racks clanging as I retreated down the hallway to my room. The other roommate turned out to be a bit of a recluse, possibly a hypochondriac, sweet but strange. She boiled frozen chicken sausages and peas in a big pot of water and ate it, unseasoned, in a bowl for dinner.
Things hadn’t been going my way, romantically or otherwise, for some time. I had spent my first year after college hiding in an Ikea-furnished apartment in Paris, skipping art history lectures to annotate The Corrections and binge-watch Grey’s Anatomy on a VPN. One night in front of the Notre Dame I got into an argument with my best friend. I accused her of neglect. She in turn called me selfish, saying the one true thing no depressed person can stand to hear. I looked out at the glittering Seine and mentally noted that jumping in from this height would only look ridiculous.
New York, though, was looking up. I had lucked into an internship at a new art space in an old factory. And I had just downloaded a dating app for the first time, determined to put five years of celibacy behind me. When Susan Miller predicted that my Super Star Love Day was a once-in-a-decade event, I flipped on an internal switch, ready to be touched at last.
I decided I would direct my romantic kismet at a dreamy mandolin player I’d gone to college with. He was first pointed out to me Freshman year as I ascended the stone steps of the dining center. I locked my gaze on his smooth blond head as it slipped behind the trees on his way off campus. His pretty outline sustained my first campus artist crush, before receding to make way for others.
Like manna from heaven, the mandolin player was playing a show the night of my Super Star Love Day. So I set out to claim my second chance. I recruited a wingman in the form of a mutual college acquaintance who lived a few blocks from me. He met me at the B48 bus stop and we rode up to Williamsburg together, chatting with enthusiasm about our newly adopted city. Brooklyn and all it had represented to us from afar was still holding on—by a thread we didn’t yet know how thin—to its old self.
When we got to the Knitting Factory in time for the opener, my wingman and I hung around the bar sipping whiskey gingers out of plastic cups, sharing memories of basement shows, campus weirdos, and our hopes of leaving behind the small disappointments and missed connections of a too-insular liberal arts college. My mind flitted to the mandolin player backstage, feeling very clever for having buddied up with someone who would lead me directly to him after the show. The crowd at the Knitting Factory radiated my good spirits back to me. It was the height of Lena Dunham’s New York: we needed to know neither the band playing nor the strangers in the crowd to feel like we were in the right place in the right decade, with no ambition so great or so small as to make something cool that people just like us would read about later in the Brooklyn Rail.
Then, in the red glow of the concert, we ran into a cartoonist I had liked my Sophomore year. This one I had actually gotten to know, over the course of a Sociology seminar in a depressing basement classroom. When I had heard he was leaving for a year abroad in Nepal, I emailed him on the last day of the semester: “I really enjoyed getting to know you these last few months…let’s hang out when you get back to the States.” A year later, I caught his eye at a barbecue at the Vegetarian House. He invited me back to his dorm room to meet his baby ball python and in the light of the snake’s heat lamp, I eyed the slightly disturbed cartoons he’d hung on his wall. Neither of us made a move, and a few months later he had a girlfriend.
As the cartoonist, my wingman, and I staked out standing room in front of the stage, my ego was aglow with its good fortune. The mandolin player had been my original target, but perhaps it was the cartoonist I was truly meant to find on my Super Star Love Day. Either boy would be perfect. Because neither of them was real. They were both iterations of an idea, one that I had latched onto in adolescence: an artsy boy who would stand in for the creative ambitions I could not yet claim as my own. That’s why all my campus artist crushes were interchangeable. In each one, I was channeling the fantasies I cherished for myself: musician, intellectual, artist.
After the show, the mandolin player joined us outside for a smoke. And so here I am, twenty-two on a warm September night in Williamsburg, pulling a cigarette from someone’s pack of American Spirits. I’m in a circle of men that I figure are all to some degree available to me. This is the first time I’ve allowed myself to have such a thought, and it’s probably the first time I might be right. Outside the campus bubble, they have retained their artsy patina, while it’s only outside the campus bubble that I feel able to pull off the protective layer I had cast over myself those four years, my invisibility cloak for remaining unseen and undesired.
I’m drunk on whatever cheap mixed drinks my wingman has been fetching me—he’s the only one I have no designs on, so we’ve been vibing all night—and drunk on the astrological gods who dictated that this is the day my luck will change. I have my wingman to my right, the mandolin player to my left, and the cartoonist directly in front of me. I feel like one of those flimsy cardboard wheels of fortune that used to come with board games. With the slightest jiggle of the table, the red plastic needle spins recklessly in a new direction.
My ambitions are tingling but frankly I’ll take what I can get. What I get, when we all chart our way home, is my wingman’s proposition to share a cab back to South Brooklyn. Proximity: it’s why we rode the bus together at the start of the night; it followed that it would bring us together at the night’s closing. With all my careful reading of the signs, I hadn’t foreseen that I had set up the night’s outcome from the start.
That my wingman and I would kiss in front of my building that night—that we would fall in love, move in together, adopt a cat, and finally end it four years later on a freshly landscaped pier in Brooklyn Bridge Park—would for years serve as proof that my horoscope had been right. I didn’t end up with one of my campus artist crushes. But an opportunity cropped up in their stead: a chance at a real boy, a solid one, alongside whom I could build a life of my own.
That night turned my romantic fortunes around, it’s true. But I have come to think that the talismanic power of my Super Star Love Day had nothing to do with the relationship it augured. Rather, it was that epiphanic feeling I had, drunk and cocky outside a Williamsburg show on a warm September night. The feeling that the three boys in front of me had been placed there by the astrological gods, calling down for me to “Pick one.” It was this illusion of cosmic intervention that first taught me how to chart my own love stories. Because that night I felt, probably for the first time, at reckless liberty to choose whichever one I damn pleased.
Hannah Felt Garner is a prose writer and editor living between Brooklyn and Paris. After a brush with the art world and a tangle with academia, she has heartily taken to teaching literature to adolescents. You can find Hannah's short story “First Choice” in Cleaver Magazine and her culture writing on Instagram at @hannahfeltgarner.