As I turned up Fifth Avenue I tried not to notice the many couples strolling arm in arm and then smooching goodbye on their way to work, with not a few of these people trailing heart-shaped helium balloons or toting paper-wrapped bouquets of bodega tulips. I began hallucinating a musical number in which everyone but me began to leap along the sidewalks, proposing marriage to mounted police officers, falafel cart vendors and construction workers popping out of open manholes, with everyone exchanging huge, frilly, heart-shaped boxes of Godiva chocolates. Everyone was coupled up or hugging or flirting while I pedaled glumly alone, like a chastity monitor barking at lovers to stop kissing in public.

I felt not just ignored or invisible, but like an athlete permanently benched, someone tossed out of the dating pool by a harsh blast from the referee’s whistle. This would be my life: I was barreling toward thirty, I still wasn’t making enough money to live in Manhattan without roommates, and while I loved my job, I knew there was something silly about it, something ephemeral and not quite adult. I helped to plan beachside weddings; Sweet Sixteens for girls who were being given Birkins and more sculpted noses; movie premieres for sequels to sequels; and gala launches of new Apple products that tracked a pet’s lung capacity or reminded the user to tell their coworkers about new Apple products. This felt like a suitable career for a Ken doll, a snippy gay sidekick in a rom-com, or an heiress between stints in rehab. I needed to apply myself and maybe go back to grad school or come up with something more butchly lucrative and aspirational in one of those fields that baffled and bored me, like finance or commercial real estate development. I briefly considered tutoring people in poverty-stricken countries on creating Wonder Woman–themed bat mitzvah centerpieces, as a form of Associate Event Architects Without Borders.

What I needed was something I’d never confided to anyone, not even my dearest friends and family members, because it was such an impossible and yearned-for wish, something that I wanted so badly it made me believe I had a soul. I wanted this one thing with such certainty that I knew it was more than a journal-entry doodle or a childhood fantasy that I needed to outgrow. It was who I was.