Three weeks earlier, the professor had written to tell me she was four and a half months pregnant with her second child. After reading her note, I put my head on my desk and cried. I continued to cry for two weeks: on the subway into the city, at the taco truck outside the club, inside the DJ booth. I was used to feeling envy when it came to pregnancy. It’s something I’ve looked forward to since I was seven, after a day spent with a pregnant friend of my mother’s who I thought was the most beautiful woman in the world. I cried tears of jealousy the whole car ride home, and my mother promised me I’d have a turn one day. “You’re just too young right now,” she’d said as I buried my face in stuffed animals. But I wasn’t prepared for the unbearable pain I would feel when it was a woman I fancied myself in love with. Nothing highlighted the one-sidedness of our relationship more than having no idea she was midway through her second trimester, thinking instead that she was falling for me. How stupid was I to believe she could’ve cared about me in some way, in any way at all, that I was anything more than just a fleeting thought, an email in her inbox, an occasional lunch date. Every time I pictured her with her husband, whom I’d only seen in a thumbnail-size photo I’d found online, my stomach turned metallic and I felt I was choking. Maybe it was the subtext, the one my shattered ego invented, that taunted, I have what you don’t have. You pathetic thing, don’t you see I’m so much more than you?

I’d heard those words before. But I knew the professor would never think such mean-spirited thoughts, even if I chose to hear them. It was shameful to expect her to care about me enough to condescend.