We’re in each other’s hands now. Why is that a scary place to be?

Charlie Kirk's death and the time I lost my cat

Amid all these distressing, unmistakable signs that American democracy is sliding into repressive dictatorship, I couldn’t stop thinking about the time I lost my cat.

She’s a grey tabby-Siamese mixed with taupe grey fur, a cream white belly and plaintive meow. Her previous owner removed her claws after a fight with a dog, which also cost her tail and most of her self confidence.

I still had all my body parts, but my breakup had left me similarly diminished. All this is to say we fell deeply in love and soon I could not imagine life without her. I named her Amai, a Japanese word that means sweet.

One day I came home and she was gone. The window screen had popped out as she rubbed against it, and it was a 12 foot drop to the ground. I googled “how to find lost cat,” and for the next three days, I did every result one after the other before collapsing into bed around 3 am.

The internet offers the bereft pet owner an exhaustive to-do list but no certainties: buy a Facebook or Craigslist ad, post regularly to every social media platform, send out something called a Paw Alert, print out and post signs, check shelter sites for your pet’s microchip, walk around calling their name with their favorite toys, knock on the doors of every single house and businesses nearby, leave your information and a picture of your cat.

All of these are basically different ways of asking for people’s help. And this is why losing a cat is so scary. Because what determined whether I would get Amai back was essentially the health of the society around me. If you have ever needed to live off of that meagre repast - the average amount of fucks we give the average stranger on the average day - you don’t forget the experience.

This is why I thought of trying to find my cat, as I watched these strange new violent political convulsions in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death. Guardrails and checks are gone. So much of what we have come to see as American life seems to hinge upon the quality and character of our society’s bonds - democracy, freedom of speech, art, religion, movement, the facts of science and the autonomy of body and gender. We’re in each other’s hands now, and we are just now realizing what a truly terrifying place that is to be.

I first really understood this when I lost Amai. For a month I knocked on every door, talked to every stranger and pressed every Ring camera button I saw. But many of my neighbors who I saw every day wouldn’t even let me peek behind their fence to see if she was there. I blurted my spiel into closed doors and windows, hoping someone would overhear and take pity. A few doors did eventually open, but not more than a few on each block. Others demanded to know why a cat would run away from me, and began to interrogate me about how I was feeding and caring for her.

I’d spotted her beneath a car at midnight the day she went missing, but a police cruiser came up behind me as I was crouched beneath the vehicle. She ran away as the officer was interrogating me. I was furious, mostly unreasonably, at the LAPD for caring more about some random stranger’s car than my cat.

I found I was already grieving her loss. Deep down, I’ve never been a big believer in society though I try very hard and go through all of the motions. It’s a consequence of growing up in Tennessee and slowly coming to understand why Southern hospitality never extended to me and my family.

In California, none of my neighbors at any place I or my family have lived have ever been particularly friendly. They’re more likely to call the city to inspect our backyard pergola.

Amai and I lived in Venice Beach, a place that was clearly once a proud neighborhood but had become too valuable a real estate brand to function as one any more. Now it’s more like a luxury lifestyle environment and tourism area, probably one of the worst places in the city to lose a cat. Perhaps I’m being too hard on it. It was a neighborhood not so unlike every neighborhood I had lived in Los Angeles, in that it wasn’t really any sort of collective, just a place where a bunch of people rented and owned homes near each other.

Neighborhood is one of those legacy terms we keep using even though it doesn’t mean anything any more, because we have nothing to replace it. We have a lot of words like that now. You hear them in political speeches but not in daily life; freedom and its solemn cousin, liberty. Lofty words like hope, democracy, justice, and truth, and especially uses of the word American, as in the American People and the American way.

Our politics uses these words like credit cards and we’ve simply maxed them out. It’s easy to blame politicians but I think we’ve all contributed to it, this mass cheapening, this catastrophic devaluation of truth and meaning in our own small ways. We spend most of our days affixed to black rectangles that inexorably encourage this behavior with slavishly affirmative algorithms that never seem to punish any falsehood. The transactions never get declined so why wouldn’t we keep swiping?

But none of this mattered to me when I was looking for Amai. I desperately needed a neighborhood to exist. Mine was a selfish deathbed conversion, but I would have done anything to make the concept real. I kept imagining her hiding, starving, just moments from whatever scare would jolt her from her hiding place and into the street where anything could happen.

In the end, Amai and I were aided not by neighbors, but by cat lovers. Henry, the local Korean liquor store guy - also a cat lover - let me put up my sign in the window. And one night, as I was making my rounds with her food and toys, a guy named Kody spotted me. I must have looked devastated because he asked me if I was ok and helped me look for at least half an hour. He was just a guy on the way home from the bar, but he was a cat owner, and he knew how painful it was to lose a cat.

And two months after I lost her, when I was out of town visiting family, I got a text from a woman who lived down the street. Amai had been hiding in the foundation of a nearby building, and had emerged, after hiding for a month, and begun to eat another cat’s food.

I drove back to LA and got Amai back. And maybe the only lesson in that is that in America in 2025, it is far easier to love cats than to love each other.

I’m really ashamed to say that I’ve forgotten this woman’s name. But if she or Kody or Henry ever needed a favor from me, they would have it. Whatever bonds we had, as cat lovers or as neighbors, I would try to make it mean something, no matter the differences in our politics or perspectives. I don’t know if that’s going to make a difference, but that’s where I’ll start.