fire and ice, I guess

january 2025 loose ends

Feb 02, 2025

My 2025 started, by most definitions, in the best way possible: in a sweaty apartment, surrounded by friends. When the ball dropped, I rushed to chew down twelve red grapes while our hosts popped the champagne over Griffith Park Boulevard.

It was foggy that night, and cold. Right after midnight, the frantic energy of December finally caught up with me. I’d been traveling for three weeks, then packing for two. I was moving across the country within 24 hours, for reasons that made less sense with every minute. I left the party with a dehydration headache and a stack of notes from a jar labeled “give Kylie compliments.” I held them next to my heart on the way to the car, alongside the knowledge that this moment, like all perfect things, would not last.

—

The flight was at 9 pm on January 1st. I watched the Rose Parade, sold my car, and headed to LAX with three big bags and an upper lip quivering. A kinda-sorta relationship ended that day; my period started. Even by the overheated standards of a coming-of-age story, it seemed like a bit much. By 7 pm, I was openly crying in the security line. Feet going cold, Blundstones hanging from my fingers, Ohio State fans whooping around me in violent red, an awful ukulele song playing over the PA – basically, hell.

not questioning but, I wrote in my notes app, before a TSA agent yelled at me.

scared, I added later.

At the gate, I slumped on the ground and cried some more. Group 7 was called. I got on last, shimmying into my window seat (again, a bit much). My poor seat-neighbor should be financially compensated for the amount of sniffles and muffled “oh gods” he heard over the next five hours. He kept his gaze forward and headphones on, god bless him.

The plane rumbled forward and made its introductory arc toward the ocean, then back toward California. I thought about that Eleanor Roosevelt quote, how she once said that the best time to fly over Los Angeles was “at night, when all the lights are on and the city lies below you like a multi-colored heap of jewels.” I wanted to run my fingers through them, one last time. My eyes darted up and down, trying to take in everything – the sawtooth filigree of Marina Del Rey; the ink-black blotch of the Santa Monica mountains; the vein-lines of the 110 and 405. “Refuge of the Roads” started up in my headphones; I skipped it. Shut up, Joni. I don’t want to hear about newness or freedom or running away. I want my friends back. I want to stay here, suspended, over the most beautiful place on earth. The plane banked south, over glowing parking lots and twinkling suburbs. It pierced the cloudline halfway across Orange County. I looked down. Tiny red fireworks shot out of Cinderella’s castle, and then my window went hazy. The crying started again. My seatmate turned up his podcast.

At JFK, I nursed a Dunkin Donuts coffee for 90 minutes, waiting for a civilized time to enter my new apartment building. It took less than an hour to unpack. I sat on the floor, cold and dumb, vague lists of to-dos swirling around my head. Easy stuff like “make friends” and “find purpose.” I pulled up a map on my phone, made three big zooms out. There is where my life was, and here is where I am. What the fuck. Los Angeles will always be there, I reasoned. This is just a field trip. You’ll come back home with so many stories. I wiped my eyes, bought a bagel, called my mom.

That was day one as an LA-to-New York transplant. January 2. You know what happened next.

It’s hard to talk about fire, just as it’s hard to talk about Los Angeles, without falling into cliche. The city’s predicated on it; spend more than a year there and it’ll show up in some capacity – a palm tree ablaze, a roadside fireball, a building in sudden gray ruins.

My personal fire inventory: In 2018, my mom visited me at USC. The standard Santa Monica-to-South Central route, usually about 30 minutes, took 3 hours because Malibu was evacuating. In 2024, an apartment building three blocks from me burned to the ground. I walked past the wreckage for the next few mornings, watching the debris disappear in stop-motion tableau. A pair of baby shoes hung from the fence; a smoke-stained mural of Kobe Bryant stood next door. I tried to Google if anyone was hurt, and found nothing.

Late one night in 2023, I woke up to popping and a sickening glow. The fence was on fire, with tongues of flame reaching up to my second-story bedroom. I yanked my boyfriend awake and toward the front door. We both reached for the deadbolt. Our fingers fumbled against each other, all panic, trying to unlock it at the same time. We called the fire department and broke up 3 weeks later. The precarity of the moment, of the city itself, was too much for a brittle partnership. That fire, absolutely miniscule in context, was an early domino in the line that led me to New York in the first place. Fire ruins and distorts. It ends things. In Los Angeles, its threat is everywhere.

I say this not to center myself in any way, but to underline the nauseous recognition I felt when my screens turned orange and the well-meaning check-in texts switched direction, taking on a more desperate tone. I saw the same pictures you did: the verdant backyards turned to martian landscapes, the steel-beamed spiral staircase silhouetted against the ocean, the signs – those wacky, gorgeous, mid-century signs! – cracked and blistered on the ground. I ran through memories – of perfect dinners, early-morning summits, weird little concerts on restaurant patios – in places now turned to ash. Those losses were nothing, truly, in comparison to those directly affected. They stung nonetheless. We all knew this was coming, it felt. And it’s so much worse. It felt wrong to not be there, to be unable to help directly. So much for Los Angeles always being there, and so much for the field trip.

My first days in New York were bad. Studded with panic attacks, impulsive calls to friends and more red heart emojis than I have ever sent. I felt like a baby – all shiny and stupid and in the way, taking too long to cross every street, riding the subway with some humiliating purchase like a comforter or shower rod, eyes stinging, fingers numb. As a lifelong west coaster, I was struck by how goddamn old the bricks and concrete seemed here – more weathered by time than sunlight, unsubjected to the constant burning and shaking of their Pacific-coast equivalents. A new city impenetrable, an old one on fire. Memories hit like lemon-squirts on open wounds; invitations I’d said no to, texts without a response, birthdays forgotten and nights spent unhappily in. Every moment not spent in absolute wonder, absolute gratitude, seemed like a waste. You didn’t appreciate what you had, hissed the cruelest parts of my psyche, and you’re never going to get it back.

Unmoored and uneasy, I focused on the basics. I took long walks, cooked a lot, read more than I have in months. Ironically, the few books I had with me were Los Angeles-dominant; the result of a last-minute trip to Skylight after most of my belongings were shipped away. I tore through The Day of the Locust in three manic gulps and carried Rosecrans Baldwin’s Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles around like Linus’ blanket for a week or so. In it, the author attempts to map the emotional landscape of the city – just as varied, strange, overgrown and violent as its physical counterpart. He covers the loneliness, the ambition, and the empty-headed optimism commonly associated with the city. But late in the final chapter, he concludes that “if there is a predominant feeling in [Los Angeles], it is…an uneasy temporariness, a sense of life’s impermanence: the tension of anticipation while so much quivers on the line.”

Impermanence. That seemed to be the theme this month. If you want to be annoying, you could say it’s the theme of every month, but whatever. Impermanence of places, of people, of the norms that hold (held?) our society together. Earlier in Everything Now, Baldwin interviews Los Angeles historian Sam Sweet, the author of the All Night Menu series (sidenote: these are sick, highly recommend ordering a few), what he finds special about the city’s psychological character. He echoes the idea: “One of the most profound gifts of Los Angeles is that it forces you to reckon with the truth of impermanence…This is something that short-circuits people.”

Geological chaos, movie-colony madness, its place at the hallucinatory endpoint of American empire – there are lots of contributing factors to Los Angeles’s essential precariousness, which Baldwin lays out quite nicely. But its sense of shakiness goes beyond regional specifics: “What can be said of the United States often can be said most clearly about Los Angeles. Historically, the city-state had often suggested where not only the American city was headed but also the American people, with all their Americanness. All gig workers now, all climate refugees now. All of us trapped, consciously or not, by our racist past and policies.”

Los Angeles’ crises mirror, exaggerate and literalize the crises of the nation. And both, obviously, are in peril. The crises highlighted this month (take your pick: climate, social, constitutional, human rights) are not new and not surprising, but the snowball effect is overwhelming. I didn’t need a book to tell me that. What I did need is some guidance on how to deal with the queasy impermanence, to avoid that sense of short-circuiting.

The message I’m seeing, over and over, is that we only have each other. In the wake of our obvious failure to create the kind of community-oriented, supportive civil society that our friends and neighbors deserve at a macro scale, we are forced – at best, inspired – to focus on those values in the micro.

I’m trying to find the hope in these statements:

No one is coming to save me.
Nothing gold (or wood or steel or plastic or pixel) can truly stay.
There is nothing more important than the presence of others.

As someone who used to have panic attacks from literal clocks, I’m embracing, or at least accepting, the impermanence of the era, personally and globally, to the degree that I can. Ironically, the raw-nerve foreignness that inspired this post is already fading. The U-Haul boxes have been (mostly) unpacked. The room I sleep in looks more like mine and my cooking habit is falling off already. The ice on the sidewalk has melted, reformed, and melted again.

Ripped from the context of my entire adult life up to this point, I’m performing a careful guess-and-check of who I am or could be. Some elements have proven surprisingly malleable (I can, in fact, survive without a half-empty Liquid Death in my car at all times) and others have snapped back in rebellion (I cannot, in fact, eat cream cheese without consequences). But as my routines turn soft and familiar, I’m trying to keep the searing reminders of this month in my periphery. Memento arsi or something.

So I’m calling when I get lonely. I’m talking to the bartender. I’m paying in cash. I’m trying my hardest to keep my attention on the people and places around me – because I know one day, literally or figuratively, they too will burn.

I didn’t set a new year’s resolution this year because I suspected, deep down, that one would be thrust upon me. This is the closest thing I’ve found. I pray to god I can stick to it.

Acme Thought Corp.

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