I called Renata, my go-to support for this sort of thing, forgetting that she was in an especially self-righteous, not-taking-any-shit mood, as her own relationship was faltering. She and Thomas, her boyfriend of five years, were on break, his choice, which meant all of her frustration with him got transposed onto me. We were planning a trip to Joshua Tree at the end of May to celebrate her graduation from med school, a trip that was also partly intended to get her mind off Thomas while he “mulled things over” and decided if he wanted to commit. Though everyone else advised her to move on—it was their second break, the first time came after he’d slept with someone else—I’d told her he was worth waiting for. Maybe I was overcompensating for how our friendship had begun: with an unwanted advance and subsequent rejection. But in truth, I’d been hearing about Thomas since college, his Sigma Chi days. I knew that she had stuck with him through much worse.

Fed up with the professor and her precursors, Renata sighed into the phone when I gave her the update. “Unbelievable,” she said. “How dare she get pregnant by her husband without asking you!”

I hung up immediately—it wasn’t the time for sarcasm. I was experiencing the same pain I’d felt at the end of three years with Kate. As I lay in bed feeling shattered, my phone buzzed with a call from Anna. “Oh good,” she said, “you’re awake.”

It was two in the afternoon. Her passive aggression seethed. She was growing tired of my “profession.” Being a DJ entailed sleeping until some disconcerting hour of the day, drinking my first coffee while everyone else was enjoying happy hour cocktails, and then leaving for work as Anna returned home for the evening. It also entailed an unexpected loneliness, one that tugged at me like a dog that needed to be fed. On the early-morning F train from the Lower East Side back to South Slope, I’d scroll through pictures of friends clustered together in both familiar and exotic locations, announcements of new relationships and engagements. I craved a normal social life, a normal life, or at least a job that didn’t completely preclude me from having one.