And yet. I feel as though something fundamentally broken in me would finally be whole if I could just become one of those people in the windows. But right now, I am on the other side of the glass, a stranger in a strange car who should probably move before the neighborhood patrol comes by.

Well, at least Leah will appreciate your gift, I tell myself, trying not to think about how I stood on her front step for minutes, bracing myself to brave the bustling apartment. I try not to recall the overheard chatter, loud and happy and foreign, how the thought of taking part in that joy filled me with fatalistic despair, how my little offering reproached me as I retreated from the threshold.

What a waste of my evening, to schlep out to Target for the result to mean so little. In fact, a voice in the back of my mind reminds me helpfully, Leah probably hasn’t opened the door yet. It’s not too late to retrieve the bag and exchange its contents for five pints of cookie dough ice cream.

This is more important, I tell myself firmly. Besides, the gift isn’t really for the baby. It’s for Leah.

I distract myself with the mental image of perpetually-put-together Leah in a Carter’s onesie. It’s funny. Sitting there, eyeing my washed-out reflection in the rearview mirror, I laugh.

That’s mean, says a mental voice immediately. It’s not Leah’s fault you’re still single.

OOF.

But something in this situation has to be Leah’s fault. There’s no way to bear this otherwise: the irony of spending my meager entry-level salary on an acknowledgement of how much more my friend has, how superior she is, how she has won, how I have lost, how I have nothing. Of driving here with this dumb bag with its dumb onesie and ultra-dumb card, of leaving my dignity on the side of the beltway like roadkill.

My pain seeks a scapegoat, and it wants that scapegoat to be Leah. If it isn’t Leah’s fault, then it must be my own, or Hashem’s — and then, I am in big trouble. Then, I ask questions with no answers and make people uncomfortable at shiurim and eat a pint of ice cream before crying myself to sleep.

Can’t go down that road.

My foot presses the brake; my hand hovers over the gearshift. I want to get out of here, to detach from these thoughts. And I will. Over the next few weeks, I will answer Leah’s texts, including the snapshot of little Sarah in the Carter’s onesie, in polite monosyllables. When her name comes up in conversation, I will not force myself to pretend excitement. A couple of months from now, I will turn a corner in the supermarket and see Leah waiting in the checkout line, and before I make a conscious decision, my feet will steer me away.

But for now, I remain in Leah’s parking lot, transfixed by those rows of illuminated windows framing domestic tableaus. The good and the bad — cherry dining sets and threadbare sofas, crystal chandeliers and stained carpets, orderly pantries and overturned Doonas, couples clinking glasses and children throwing violent fits.

These things are beautiful in their authenticity; they are the building blocks of meaningful lives. They blur into a whole as I watch — perhaps because I’m crying, perhaps because I haven’t blinked. I’m staring as if gazing hard enough will bore a hole through one of those windows — a hole through which I can climb — and carve a niche, somewhere in this complex, for me and the life I should have had.

But this is all fantasy, says my reasonable voice. You are single; you must accept that. You are so single that the bricks of this building would repel you as instinctively as a magnetic pole repels its peer. Yes, the life behind these windows is your dream, but it will never be yours.

Not because you don’t believe it can ever happen. You could meet someone wonderful tomorrow, but you’re already behind schedule. You will never walk in sync with Leah ever again. You may get another happy ending, but it is too late for this one, to be twenty-three with a family in some refrigerator box of an apartment, learning this landscape with your friends right beside you.

You wanted that, and you were told that you would have it. You grew up understanding that this was your birthright and that single people were the outliers, the exceptions. Now, you are one of those exceptions, paying for your good-girl tendency to adhere to social norms, and it is breaking you to pieces in this parking lot.

Your heart insists that you were supposed to have this, are supposed to have it, that a Heavenly representative will soon come along to straighten out what will turn out to be a simple, though regrettably significant, oversight. He will apologize profusely before snipping a hole in the space-time continuum to send you back to your first post-seminary year, where you will meet Mr. Right when you were supposed to meet him and live the life that should be yours.

But that is your heart speaking, not your head. Time travel is not on the table, and it is impossible that Hashem has made a mistake. You must teach your heart to understand, Dina. That is your avodah now. These lives are not yours; there is no place for you here. Let go. Look away.

I can’t look away.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 919)