She told me a story about a woman with whom she had gone out to dinner. The woman was an old friend of her mother’s, a remote friend, but someone who had been important in the distant past, and her mother had spoken to her about this woman many times. She and the woman were both living in the same city now, a small city that she found one could either like very much, or dislike, but that it was hard to maintain a completely neutral attitude toward. Recently, and on a whim, she said, she had texted this woman and arranged to meet her for dinner. During the meal the woman had nothing but negative things to say about her own life, and about the city. She said she lived in an apartment that had terrible feng shui, her bed pointed toward the door and she slept badly as a result. She said she walked outside her apartment and all the streets around her street were dead ends, and every day she was forced to walk the same route to the high street, that as a result of the monotony she could feel the life being sucked out of her every time she stepped outside. She said she was a dancer but worked as a paralegal for a large pharmaceutical corporation to make her money, and she both found it incredibly depressing and struggled to make ends meet. She was in her early fifties, she was alone, she had five roommates, they shared a communal house. There were more facts about this woman, she said, but these were the few you needed to understand her life. There was one more, she said, the fact that this woman was a person, a person who she was now realizing was a type of person, who moved around to avoid her problems. She had lived in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Brisbane, London and now she was here, in this city, and she said she was dreaming about moving to Italy.