Easter

19 Apr, 2026

collective

A series of choices from last year had resulted in my standing off to the side at the TSA checkpoint for about 25 extra minutes—fumbling to use my Yubikey with my smartphone, an example of yet another decision I’d made in favor of ‘friction’ and ‘security’ that now feels questionable, as any extra friction at a TSA checkpoint becomes exponentially much more costly—so I’d rolled up to my gate only minutes before boarding began.

A familiar face approached. “I know you,” he began warmly. It was the man from the RV show! A pastor by trade, with gregarious and charming youth pastor energy, he is currently selling RVs. (“I was looking at your business card this morning,” I laughed. “I was unpacking and repacking my purse.”)

His name is Tony. At the RV show he had assured me I didn’t have to stick with any one of his company’s brands. “I can find you anything,” he’d told me gallantly.

“Does anyone ever call you St. Anthony?” I’d asked him. “Because you can find anything,” I’d pressed.

“No one’s ever called me that,” he’d said, which is perfectly valid since he attended a Protestant seminary.

At the time I’d asked him a question about RV care and maintenance. Instead of answering it directly, he’d suddenly volunteered that RVs are only under warranty for the first year of ownership, so that’s when you need to drive the hell out of it—to detect any problems, deficiencies, or weirdness right away. With a start I’d realized that, if I were to own an RV, I’d need to be owning it and driving it right now: that RV ownership and going back to school might be two competing, contradictory aims, that I’d have to spend all my time learning about either one thing or the other.

His flight was delayed, while mine was waiting to board. “What perfect timing,” I said to him approvingly. Now we were picking up where our last conversation had left off. He was explaining that he and his spouse want to plant a church that goes deeper than the usual superficial stuff, a safe space for people to share their deepest woundings.

“Ohh, a church family,” I teased. “Is that what that word means?”

“Sometimes safer than a real family,” he teased back.

“That’s the idea, anyway,” I agreed, nodding. I hesitated.

Then I told Tony that I’d always been very open and vulnerable about my woundings and battles, blah blah blah, “to the extent that it even inspires other people,” I suggested. But I’d been thinking about Scientology¹ the past couple days—how a high-control environment will use that type of information, the “auditing” process itself, to compile intricate dossiers about members’ deepest woundings, sins, secret shames, as collateral, information to exploit. All in service of retaining membership, of course: user retention. “So now they’re held hostage,” I said. I sighed. “I’m not trying to be critical,” I said to him carefully. “I just think I’ve been moving through the world as if it were ideal, rather than the world as it is.”

“You’re modeling the behavior others should follow,” Tony said.

“Am I?” I said skeptically. It suddenly seemed to me that certain destructive or abusive systems might structurally hang on me believing that.

My spouse had always talked about the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and I was beginning to get it. If just one person in a collective has decided to act in a self-serving way, out of fear usually, the rules have now changed, and everyone else has to restrategize. It is, obnoxiously, game theory. By doubling-down and refusing to play the game everyone else is playing, I could self-soothe by believing I was taking the high road, but now I’d be the one person exploited.

“How are you going to keep the space safe?” I asked Tony now. Because if there is a single bad actor in the collective—

“Right, and this is where a lot of people’s old church woundings come from, too,” he said, nodding.

“Right,” I said.

He kept glancing over at his gate.

“I can board anytime,” I said to him. We wished each other well and parted ways.

I walked up to the kiosk and scanned my boarding pass.

“You could’ve boarded a long time ago,” the gate attendant said in surprise.

“I was just chit-chatting,” I told her.

loop

Instead of being the earliest person to the luggage carousel, I was the last, because another choice I’d made 14 years ago had resulted in a very tedious time in a public restroom stall. It was another example of the way healthier choices had meant embracing friction, in a world that is not only not built for those choices, but which is actively hostile toward them. Well, it’s a little late for me to yield and choose conformity now, so I just had to move slowly and deliberately.

I finally turned from the towel dispenser to discover I’d been trapped between a cluster of employees who’d been waiting to reset the restroom, and a pair of women who never unlinked arms. A couple employees noticed this and shuffled around, helping me to barely get unsandwiched and around the linked-arm women, to my declarations of gratitude.

Then, walking toward the terminal exit, I once again could not get around the two women who never unlinked their arms. How had I fallen behind them? I felt guilty about having been galled by them in the restroom, since maybe one of the two women had some sort of infirmity that required her to be guided or dragged along by the other. But they moved in a sort of weaving way, and it was difficult to get around them. I veered to my left, choosing to walk on the wrong side of the long hallway.

I descended the escalator, feeling relief at seeing the open clearing, the expanse of the aging baggage claim area ahead of me. I always gaze wistfully at the spot where, late at night, I’d almost plowed into Jinkx Monsoon, who was the one other person leaving the airport at that hour. I didn’t have time to recognize or place her, however, because I was too taken by the sight of her cat in a bubble backpack on her back.

She saw me staring at the cat. “He’s fine,” she assured me.

“No, I know,” I said. I’d been thinking, a little unhappily, about how much I’d always wanted to travel with Jezzy, how much she would’ve loved traveling, how she would’ve appreciated a little window seat, a little perch on my back. But that’s what I said to Jinkx Monsoon! “No, I know.” Terrific.

I walked toward my luggage looping on the carousel, but somehow I was suddenly, immediately blocked by the two women with linked arms. I jumped back, startled.

The two women turned to face me; so far I’d only seen them from behind. They were sisters, nearly identical, except one was taller and healthier in appearance while the other was more stooped and sort of withered. The reason for the weaving seemed to be because neither sister was fully in charge, but the smaller sister seemed slightly more in charge of the more robust one, and the smaller woman yanked the full-sized woman out of my way. I waited for my suitcases to come back around, contemplating this strange, almost uncanny real-world illustration of codependency.

They’d reminded me of the Twins of San Francisco, two ladies in my then-neighborhood who loved socializing and putting on a show. They really turned it on for my parents, once, as my adoptive mom couldn’t resist speaking to them at their restaurant. The Twins, in turn, couldn’t resist holding court, while my adoptive mom sat unusually rapt. The Twins seemingly spoke in unison, but in actuality one sister was always speaking ahead of the other, always leading, with the other sister echoing her. At one point it had dawned on me that one of them might have dementia and that the other was overfunctioning in order to help mask it, which it turns out is actually true: Vivian, sadly, predeceased Marian, God rest them both.

I rolled out of the airport with my luggage, looking for the pickup point for the shuttle to the rideshare lot. I noticed that a lot of the shuttles were totally empty, and they were not pulling over at the pickup point ahead of me.

I was dreading lifting both suitcases, one of them unwieldy, onto the bus. When other people see me struggling, they either do nothing or do something, and both outcomes feel awful. In September one of my suitcases had actually rolled loose, rolled right out of the luggage rack, generating momentary collective panic on the shuttle. The man next to me had leapt up, had grabbed the runaway suitcase before I could, then had lifted it up and put it sideways on top of someone else’s suitcase. I’d thanked him, spoken with him, was further indebted to him when he’d lifted my suitcase again and returned it to me. Of course he’d asked for my phone number, and of course I’d given it to him. I’d like to clamp down on these sorts of interactions. As for my number, I plan to change it as soon as I can leave iOS.

I’d started walking my suitcases away from the pickup point, loafing down the arrivals sidewalk. I stopped at another designated pickup point. A crowd soon formed.

A man started yelling at us from across the street about were any of us headed to Disneyland. No one reacted.

“No,” I finally shouted back.

He continued shouting—it’s cheaper than a taxi!—but everyone was unmoved. Everyone just wanted to go home; no one was vacationing at Disneyland. I contemplated shouting back does he take people to their six-month mammograms, but matching his aggression seemed like a bad idea. Anyway, he eventually gave up on us.

One of the shuttles finally rolled to a stop. I walked down to the second door. The driver descended the stairs at the head of the bus, standing in the main doorway of the shuttle, languidly blocking entry with both his arms. There was a bandana tied around the lower half of his face, making it impossible for anyone to understand him. I was standing the farthest away.

“Has anyone already ordered their Uber,” I repeated after him quietly.

“I have,” the businessman next to me muttered.

“He has,” I repeated louder, not sure how I’d become the designated earhorn and megaphone of the group.

Okay, the driver of the shuttle explained, here is the score: we were a five-minute walk from the shuttle lot. Otherwise, we could board the shuttle, but making the loop around the airport, with its stops and starts, would take more like forty-five minutes.

“Oh, sure!” I said, grabbing my bags.

“How long did he say?” a young man near me asked.

“I think he said we’re like a five-minute walk from the shuttle lot,” I repeated, “whereas riding the shuttle loop will take 45 minutes.”

Everyone groaned. The shuttle departed, empty. I was just glad someone had stopped to explain it all to us. I hung back behind the crowd so I could surreptitiously vape, walking my stuff down the arrivals walkway. I think at one point in the distant past I’d actually realized that baggage claim dumped us out within walking distance of the shuttle lot, but I’d always taken the loop instead. Now I was feeling appropriately chagrined at the amount of time wasted, but there was also a pep in my step.

I crossed the street, exiting the airport on foot. The sun blasted me in the face.

I pulled my luggage to one side and stood a spell. I took this opportunity to be alone with nobody around. “This is great,” I said aloud to myself, “the best of all worlds. I’m so glad the driver said something.” I articulated my gratitude where I could hear it.

body horror

On Thursday I’d gone to my first two medical appointments. Standing there half-dressed, I apologized to the technician: my skin kept sticking to the machinery, grabbing at it as if it wanted to bond with it. She assured me this was normal, but I couldn’t help but think of the little clips I’d seen of the 2024 French horror movie Else, about people fusing into their environments, merging, dissolving. My body was apparently trying to fuse with the pedal-operated mechanical table and arm. I felt repulsed by myself.

Then I was sitting in the reception area in a robe. I opened the group chat on my phone and replied: “I do think I have an issue where I’m so overwhelmed by how one choice might affect everyone that I spend a lot of time paralyzed. Ope, I need to put my clothes back on and return in 3 hours,” I messaged them.

“I have witnessed this paralysis!” a friend replied to the group chat.

Between appointments I walked up the block to a restaurant that specializes in the kind of food I used to not be able to digest. I ordered a bowl full of mushrooms and root vegetables. It came with two sauces on the side, plus a little thing of chia seeds.

I opened the group chat on my phone. “Right, so I am doing the corniest thing and reading the Empath’s Survival Guide or whichever goofy one it is,” I told them. I set my phone aside and picked up my ereader. It turned out I was actually reading The Empowered Empath; I’ve never actually read that other one, or any other books about the debilitating instinct for self-abandonment rather than self-preservation. I slowly picked at my bowl, feeling very grateful for my time alone, my recently-regained ability to digest root and cruciferous vegetables, and also seeds.

Two hours had passed. I needed a box for my leftovers. Then I stopped by the hostess station.

“I meant to ask before I settled up, but I forgot,” I said to the current hostess apologetically. “I actually also wanted to get a bag of granola.”

She walked to the bakery counter. “Are you gluten-free?” she suddenly asked me.

“I used to be,” I stammered, “but now I—why? Does the granola contain gluten?”

“No,” she said. “I want to give you a cookie. I can give you a gluten-free one, but it isn’t our most delicious one.”

I was unable to conceal my surprise.

“I always err in favor of delicious,” I finally managed to say, “thank you.”

I walked back to the medical center lost in thought. It was the second time someone had foisted a cookie on me in as many days. The morning before, the flight attendant had physically put a packet of chocolate-and-sea-salt shortbread cookies into my unwilling, not-outstretched hand. (“Have a sweet treat!” she’d said to me encouragingly.) I was experiencing some sort of chubby-girl halo effect, I thought to myself sardonically. Maybe other people saw me living my life normally, and they thought it was a bitter life of self-restriction? So they were balancing the scales for me?

But they were doing it by offering me something that personally brought them joy. That was nice. If people are going to project things onto you, I thought to myself, it might as well be positive things, joyful things. If people felt compelled to share things with me that brought them joy, I would graciously accept.

A week later I’d discuss this phenomenon with my dietitian, who is now the mother of a six-month old. I’d describe my own mental back-and-forth, teetering between believing the unkindest thing about people’s gestures versus the pleasantest thing. “I need to just… learn to receive the cookie,” I’d say to her helplessly. “To enjoy the cookie.”

“Yes, that seems to be the lesson,” she’d answer, nodding. “What is it that they say? What people say to you… says something about them. How you respond says something about you.”

I’d nod sadly, properly chastised.

During the same sesh I’d tell my dietitian about my Lyft driver Amanuel, who’d asked me how an appointment had gone. “I have low vitamin D,” I told the man.

Then and there he’d made me promise, a verbal agreement, to go outside three times a week. (“It’s best in the morning!” he said.) So I’d made this commitment to Amanuel, to schedule my sunshine, to plan for the morning.

“Orrrrr,” my dietitian said, “you could make the same commitment to… your highest self?” The first time she ever said “highest self” to me I’d had a minor delayed panic attack. Highest self? Devil worship.

But now I was laughing. I told my dietitian about Highest Kate. “I know it’s my highest self,” I said, waving her off, “it’s just easier right now to externalize it and claim I’m doing it for Amanuel.” The real Amanuel will have forgotten me in a day.

She looked at me skeptically. Okay, just so long as I knew.

I do appreciate her wariness here, though, because there’s a real danger of getting tricked into serving some other collective’s little god. I finally understand the feeling behind the average atheist’s “if that’s the ‘real’ god in charge, I’ll happily pack my bags for Hell” mentality. I know what I believe and no thank you, I’ll do my eternity in jail. You think I can’t do Hell? I’ve done Hell.

sunshine

It’s a quick half-mile back from the restaurant with cookies and granola and chia seeds. I paused some distance from the medical facility to vape, and I realized I was standing next to a gardenia bush. There was one blossom barely within reach that had already come loose. I reached for it and stood there sniffing it for a while. A robin landed under the tree I was facing. He hopped around, assessing me. I quickly googled whether robins could eat chia seeds, and then I dug into my bag of leftovers.

“Goofy-ass Disney princess shit,” I muttered as if this self-awareness made my behavior in any way okay, and I threw seeds at the foot of the tree, paying my happiness forward. I idly thought again about fusing with my environment, this constant dance of absorption and then unceremonious expulsion.

I walked back into the medical center. I tried to tiptoe past the receptionist to visit the public restroom first, but she called out to me by name. Startled, I turned to her. She must’ve seen hundreds of people in the past five hours? She told me she’d already checked me in, and that I could go up anytime. Gratefully, I thanked her, then excused myself. Maybe sometimes it can be nice to be remembered, I thought to myself half-happily, half-grimly, a double-pronged feeling twisting around itself.

On Saturday I was sitting with a friend on the steps just outside Nijiya Market. The conveyer-belt sushi restaurant had been jam-packed, so my friend had suggested we assemble our dinners piecemeal at the grocery. Now there wasn’t anyplace else to sit. We dug into our paper grocery bags.

“Look at that city bird,” I said a couple times. “I think that’s the same bird from before. He’s fearless.” He was eating little cooked grains of rice that other people had dropped. Now I was worrying aloud about his rice intake, the difficulty of swallowing and digesting rice. “I guess he’s okay,” I mused, “he hasn’t died yet.”

Another family gathered next to us. A mother sat on the step next to me, her tiny daughter now firmly wedged between us. Her daughter, not yet a toddler, was the cutest child in the whole world, and so, so incredibly small.

“Hi!” the kid said to me.

“Hey!” I said, automatically turning to greet her. She was pre-verbal, just trying something new out.

I turned back to my friend. I’d opened my nori roll incorrectly and needed help. Now my friend was messing with the plastic packaging on it.

I felt two small arms wrap about my waist. I turned. The little girl next to me was hugging me.

For a moment I consciously worried that something had happened to the child to cause her to be disinhibited. Stop projecting, I snapped at myself.

Her mother flew into a panic and told her child not to hug people.

“It’s okay,” I told the parent, in case she thought I were somehow upset with the child or her parenting. “Thank you for the hug,” I said to the little girl. I kind of put my arm on her head, realized that was someone else’s child, and turned back to my friend. Now the family was passing a nori roll around, taste-testing it.

After she hugged me a second time, the child was scolded again. Then the family abruptly left.

“Oh, I hope I’m not why they left,” I worried aloud.

“I don’t think so,” my friend said. I continued to worry about it.

I told another friend about it the next day. “I didn’t know what to do,” I admitted. I couldn’t decide on the best tack. At the time I’d speculated aloud that the family may’ve recently visited Disneyland, where the difference between random characters you can freely hug and random strangers on the street, whom you should not hug, might become a bit blurry. Besides, Japantown would feel a bit like Disneyland to a very small child.

“She thought you were a princess,” my friend suggested.

“My first thought was some other type of fluffy character,” I said, nodding, “but yes.”

But my friend on the steps had suggested it, too, this notion that I was not Goofy or Pluto, but some sort of chirpy human character.

I’d conceded the point. “I was just talking about a bird—”

“To the bird,” they were already correcting me.

Anyway, I should not have confused the child by thanking her. “Maybe I could’ve said, please do not hug strangers, but thank you, you have made me feel like a princess today.”

“You aren’t her parent,” my friend said pointedly.

“You’re right,” I said to my friend, grateful.

stations

A friend had mentioned limerence to me—specifically, how neurodivergent people are especially susceptible to it—and I agreed. I felt heartsick. I said something about an artist’s Instagram slideshow post about limerence and capitalism, which a mutual friend of ours had shared with me. The artist had connected limerence to a lifetime of being othered, devalued, particularly in environments imbued with invisible hierarchies and supremacy:

I will never judge anyone for being limerent, addicted to limerence, and diving deep again and again into the fantasy of perfect, healing romantic love where you are chosen and seen exactly for who you are.

I didn’t have the post in front of me, though, so I was trying to assemble the artist’s words and points from memory. I said something about “the fantasy of someone loving all of you,” and my chin trembled and now tears were unexpectedly pouring out of me, “instead of people picking and choosing what they want or need from you like you’re a b-b-buffet.”

It had been horrifying for both of us.

After Easter brunch I’d remarked that “creators don’t get to choose their descendants.” My friend had asked me what I meant by that, but I was unable to respond or expand on it, so I just looked at him blankly.

But you could almost reframe the Death of the Author as a sort of parentage, where my friend just can’t anticipate who will be inspired or deeply affected by his work, or how, or how they plan to build on it. One cannot select their own audience at all. That’s hair-curling—since there’s a very real likelihood of some student coming along and fucking up someone else’s legacy, for sure—but sometimes it is delightful and exhilarating to see how people grab a baton and zag with it.

Now the woman was telling us about the record she’d had as a child, “Free to Be You and Me.” She apologetically explained that it was surely a product of its time, surely outdated, but there was one sketch she’d loved in which two babies were arguing over who was supposed to be the boy and who was supposed to be the girl. One of the babies, played by Mel Brooks, was absolutely resolute that he was the girl, she explained to us.

“I’ve got to hear this,” I said, adding, “and I promise to listen and take it in the spirit in which it was originally recorded.” I nodded at her. “I’m also really into reparenting myself, listening to things I wish I’d heard the first time around.”

She described some of the other big names on the record. When she said “Alan Alda,” I shrieked.

I love Alan Alda, I said, startling the group with my burst of passion. “All the Aldas. I once bought a zine just because it was called ‘All the Aldas,’ which is a phrase I’d constantly—I just love every Alan Alda. All the Aldas. Alan Alda at every age, every station in life. My son, my husband, my father, my grandpa.” The group was laughing. “I’ve never listened to his late-in-life podcast,” I said, my hands fluttering to my face, “because I don’t want to hear him say one bad thing ever, not a single problematic—“

“I’m sure he has,” a friend said.

“No he hasn’t!” I said, to little peals of laughter. “Everyone agrees he is perfect, perfectly progressive. When he was on M.A.S.H.,” and I launched into a little thing about that lion-hearted, ferocious man, refusing to let the sitcom be watered down, supposedly a real pain to work with. “And he loves his wife,” I said, “so I bet that’s a side of him she never sees.” My toes were curling and uncurling.

My friend said something about how affected by M.A.S.H. he’d been as a 19-year old, the way Hawkeye had been a formative character.

“See?” I exclaimed. “He’s your dad, too!”

“I guess so,” my friend said pleasantly.