I live a very quiet life.

I haven’t always. I have had dumb jobs and passionate loves, heartache and noise; I’ve had plenty of watching bands play in bars, late nights on loud buses, and sobbing into the phone (sometimes all three in one night).

But for a couple of years now I have lived and worked very quietly on the second floor of a two-story brick apartment building with my cat, the illustrious and exalted Trixie. Trixie has plush black fur and an expressive tail, and she sleeps curled up in the round papasan chair in my bedroom like she’s an eagle perched in a giant nest.

She is a perfect animal and I am too. I am perfectly animal. Every day I eat and breathe, look at trees, smell the air, and pull the laces on my sneakers tight. Some days I have a zine day, which means I sit on the hardwood floor of my living room and alive through paper with my delicious paper cutter. Then I do things like carefully arrange rubber stamp letters and stroke paint onto paper with a little-kid paintbrush.

But I am also perfectly spirit. I feel and think all the time. I’m not saying I think well or figure much out, but like all of you, my mind and heart are almost always busy. I composed this essay in my mind last night while I lay in my bed in the dark. I’d had a migraine all day long and although it had already broken and the pain had leaked away, I was feeling a little crazy. That kind of pain often makes me feel like that—wild when I have it, drifty and almost bereft when it’s gone. To comfort myself I pulled my Stevie Smith book off the bedside table and into the bed with me. (Other books in my bed include: Notebooks on a Naked Youth by Billy Childish, These Demented Lands by Alan Warner, and The Opposite of Fate by Amy Tan, a book about writing that I recently acquired in a trade for one of my zines.) Trixie was asleep in her eagle’s nest at the foot of the bed, and as I lay there with my books I thought about what I wanted to tell you about my life, and about what zines mean to me. That means I went to sleep last night thinking of you.

Through doing zines I have made some wonderful friends, real friends, and we write emails and letters to each other. One thing I’ve noticed about zine folks, especially people who are younger than I am, is that they say the word love a lot. They love all the things that they like—miso soup, knitted gloves, cassette tapes—and I find this touching, though I don’t say the word quite as often myself. Zines, though—zines I love. Dreaming them up, physically constructing them, and bringing them to the post office all snug in their packages makes me feel whole in a way not much else does.

It’s hard for me to explain exactly why, but I think I love them for the same reason I loved writing in the beginning, before it got hard. Zines remind me of the point of the work: the deep and sincere need to be heard, the yearning for communion. I sign most of my zines “love, Katie” as though they’re letters because they feel a lot like letters. I mean, I wouldn’t bother saying something if I didn’t think there was someone on the other end for me to say it to. Some of you have heard what I’ve said in my zines, and I’ve heard what some of you have said in your zines, and that honestly amazes me. The connection people make with each other through writing and reading is as human as we get, and zinesters know this, they live it. I’m writing this now and you’re reading it in another now, which means we’re here together in a way; wherever we are, we’re both crackling with the same kind of life.

Can you think of anything more incredible than that?