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number seventeen on the list of most depressed cities, based on the number of prescriptions for antidepressants and the number of days people say they’re depressed in a calendar year. I don’t think he told me what the sixteen depressing cities that preceded it were, but I know he said Laredo, Texas, was supposed to be the happiest city on earth. I feel too depressed to have a cigarette and ponder moving there, and that seems like the most depressing thought of all.

6
    When I wake up later that afternoon, things seem a bit brighter. One of my cats is sitting on the pillow next to my face and she looks so adorable and innocent, I realize I can’t be as despicable a person as I feel like. I mean, I could still be horrible and have a cat like her, but she surely wouldn’t choose to sleep right next to me if I didn’t have some redeeming qualities.
    I come as close to bouncing out of bed as a person with a significant hangover can, and feed the cats. Sometimes I feel like my life is made up of the act of pouring dry food into bowls and scooping wet food from cans on top of the dry food, and then the things I do in between doing that.
    “I know it’s late for breakfast,” I tell them in my cat voice after glancing at the clock and seeing that it’s 4 P.M. “Let’s consider this brunch.” Then I realize I’ve become someone who’s perfectly comfortable talking to her cats in catlike voices, and wonder if I’m slowly losing my mind.
    I light a cigarette and pour five scoops of coffee grounds into my one-cup coffee press while I boil the water but I don’t feel like I have the patience to let it seep, so I just stir and gulp it down. As I feel the caffeine hitting my central nervous system, it occurs to me that I haven’t checked my home or cell messages in something like two days. Somehow this gives me a great surge of optimism, which is further enhanced when the woman’s computerized voice informs me that I have three new messages. I am loved and adored , I remind myself.
    “Hey, it’s Chris,” I hear, and am so annoyed that my voicemail had the audacity to count this as an actual message—and not, like, a submessage—that I delete it before he gets much further.
    Second message: “Hello, Amelia, it’s your mother,” I hear, and her voice makes me feel so automatically guilty that I want to curl up in the fetal position and never get out. “Your dad is extremely upset that you haven’t called him, and he wants me to tell him why. What should I be telling him?”
    I delete that message, feeling tears springing to my eyes. My mom hasn’t been married to my dad for over seven years, but in some ways, she’s as married to him as ever. Even though he left her in the midst of one of his affairs, when Mom met my stepdad and fell in love, Dad decided he’d made a crucial error and wanted Mom back. Mom isn’t going to go there again but she acts like she’s still married to him by having dinner with him once a week and trying to coax me into seeing him. But he’s angry and sad, so I stay away, and Mom guilts me for it. I’m not sure who’s the bad guy and who’s the good, or if the words “good” and “bad” are even relevant here, and I’m not remotely in the mood to ponder it. I delete her message before it’s done, also.
    Message number three: “Hey, it’s me again,” I hear, and recognizing Chris’s voice immediately, I toss the phone across the room so that it smashes into the wall and the piece of plastic holding the battery in breaks in two. Amazingly, Chris’s voice withstands even that. “I’m wondering if you’d want to, I don’t know, hang out,” he’s saying. I realize I have to get the hell out of my apartment immediately if I’m going to be able to get through this day without massively suicidal feelings overtaking me, so I smash out my cigarette, put on my gym clothes, and drive the three blocks to the gym.
     
    “How’s it going, Amelia?” I hear, as I’m running on