Los Angeles, I'm Yours
A love letter to the city on fire ❤️🩹
My city is on fire.
Still.
Ten days since our first power outage, since the severe winds rattled our windows and emergency aircrafts shook the house. Nine days since we set up phone trees with friends, taking shifts in the night to check the fire map every hour. Eight days since we evacuated in terror as Runyon Canyon burned. A week since we returned to our ash-sprinkled street after the evacuation order lifted.
The flames - though weakened - are still inhaling the city's edges. The city I’ve called home for over a decade. The place where I found myself and my people and became who I am.
The city of dreams is living through a nightmare.
I can’t focus on anything. I am simultaneously numb and feeling every single feeling.
Next to our front door is a collection of bags, ready to leave again at any minute - to evacuate for a second time – since the relentless Santa Ana winds don’t care about the wreckage they cause. And since we’ve learned in shocking detail how quickly a single ember can engulf an entire district.
There’s a duffel stuffed with photo albums, hard drives, and my mother’s wedding dress. An emergency go-bag filled with KN95 masks. An accordion file of documents. A small survival backpack for our cat. This is what we reduced our lives to, a handful of half-zipped bags, and it’s so much more than most people even got to save.
I keep flinching when my phone buzzes. So many updates from Watch Duty - an app I didn’t even know existed a week ago - alerting me to what the flames are doing and who’s evacuating now. These alerts are usually followed by a handful of group texts with people checking in on each other in varying degrees of panic, confusion, concern, and exhaustion.
The grief and anxiety hanging in the low-quality air are palpable. There’s a sickening sense of Deja Vu, reminiscent of March 2020, with the streets eerily quiet and everyone in masks, no matter the neighborhood. Despite multiple webinars and press releases, we still don’t know how severely this air could damage our lungs. The melted plastics and asbestos drift through the wind, and the ash floating down from the sky is made of burnt memories – of Christmas mornings in the living room and prom photos taken out front.
For Ben and I - unlike so many thousands of others - it turned out ok. Our house was fine, as was our neighborhood, and we got to come home. But I am still grieving.
I'm grieving for my community. Grieving for the grandparents who lost their family heirlooms and the children whose bunkbeds burnt up. For the small business owners whose lifelong dreams evaporated in a matter of hours. For the sunsets that can no longer be viewed from Malibu balconies. For the pets that didn’t make it out and their owners who will never recover. For those who lost loved ones.
I’m crying for the hiking trails and mountain wildflowers and the baby deer. I’m crying for the musicians, artists, and filmmakers who’ve lost their life’s work. Hours of footage, canvases, and recordings that will never be seen or heard. I'm crying for the parents who will have no tangible items to remember their kids’ childhoods and the children who are scared and confused without their stuffies to hold tight.
My heart breaks for the Black residents who found a safe space in Altadena years ago and who have built generations of community there. For the workers who keep the Palisades running - the landscapers, housekeepers, and nannies who’ve lost their income for an indeterminate amount of time. For the thousands of families who have lost the hearths of their clan.
Despite the cliches of swimming pools and movie stars, Los Angeles is overflowing with real people who know real struggle. People move here willingly to struggle for their art, their families, their creativity, their purpose. People with big ideas and crazy dreams and the courage to pursue them. The city is a beacon for so many, a haven for the kooky, the odd, the displaced, and the imaginative. It’s a lighthouse for queer kids growing up in red states and for single mothers in Vietnam. Its a city of escapees and weird cousins and drama geeks and black sheep. Yes, it’s celebrity smoothies, Botox, and crystals, but it's also acceptance, encouragement, and opportunity.
It’s a refuge for so many - a liberation from tradition, restrictions, tyranny, and conventional lifestyles. A place where immigrant families come from all corners of the world, ready to start completely over. Now, many of those families have to do it all over again.
You can be anything you want to be in this city, and countless subcultures peacefully coexist. Drag queens, fruit vendors, animators, graffiti artists, activists, hyper-pop ravers, spiritual gurus. Rockabillies and magicians and low riders and Surfers. The sunset strip comedians, the Burbank neighbors who go nuts over Halloween, the Arts District loft boys who throw the best rooftop parties. There are so many beautiful cultures. Any night of the week, you can choose ramen or kimchi or the most amazing street tacos.
Last week, while sitting at a stoplight near Fairfax, I saw a group of young orthodox Jewish girls - not much older than 10 or 12 - carrying heavy bags and boxes to a donations drop-off. A group of sneakerheads in their early 20s approached them, and I watched misty-eyed in my rearview mirror as they helped them carry the load. Two very different communities joining together to help.
This city is so beautiful, so weird, so complicated. It’s glamorous and disgusting and empowering. This city is mighty.
The community is strong, and this disaster is making it stronger. People are putting their skills to use and their differences aside. There are hours-long lines of volunteers and donation drop-offs, and many relief organizations are at capacity. I’ve never seen anything in my life like the way everyone is joining in. Production coordinators are directing human conveyor belts to get fire victims fresh hygiene products and socks. Fashion designers are giving away warehouses of product and hair salons are offering free shampoos and braiding.
Every corner of the city is getting involved on a grassroots level, and we’re being creative because that’s what we do best.
Long after the rest of the country has moved on, we will be here, united and engaged. When you live in LA, whether you’re a born native or a transplant, this city and the people in it mean something to you.
We’re invisibly linked across the sprawling freeways, tethered together from the coastline to the mountains - both of which are burning.
We’re united.
We’ve all gotten parking tickets. We all love the Dodgers and hate Spectrum. We all wish we made it to the beach more often. We’ve all seen some lousy improv or watched the skateboarders in Venice. We all have opinions on whether Coles or Philippe originated the French Dip. We all cried for Kobe.
It takes courage to live here. Courage to make art, to follow a dream, to open a restaurant or a nail salon. Courage to put yourself out there over and over, to live in a place drenched in stigma and high rent prices. Courage to navigate the freeways and the union strikes. The bravery is worth it for the countless little pockets of beauty, warmth, ingenuity, creativity, and laughter.
It’s a thousand little cities in one - each their own strange and magical worlds.
Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights, where groups have gathered en masse since the 1930s to get hired for gigs and play music in the street. Clifftons downtown, a woodland-themed fever dream of a cafeteria that supposedly inspired Disneyland. The Velaslavasay Panorama in West Adams and the Magic Castle in Hollywood are both odd and wonderful remnants of a different time.
The Huntington in Pasadena, where so many children will remember running around the gardens. Will Rogers State Beach, home to millions of memories spread out on beach blankets and towels.
One of my favorite places is Watts Towers, whose dedicated creator, Simon Rodia, spent 30 years building these bizarrely beautiful structures by hand. Blown away by the towers when she first visited them decades ago, my mother made and hung a little watercolor in her studio with a famous quote by Rodia. This framed painting is currently by my front door in that duffel bag with the photo albums:
“I had in mind to do something big - and I did!”
THAT is how people feel about this city. You can do something big here. No matter how big or small that “big” is. And even if it takes us 30 years to rebuild it by hand, I know we will. Because that’s who we are.
I love you, LA.
If you’re interested in donating, volunteering or amplifying causes, please find resources in this LA Fires Master Doc. It also includes hundreds of resources for those affected and displaced, so please pass along. ❤️🩹
Very touching. I had to wait until I could bear reading it. My granddaughter is traumatized b/c her pre-school burned down. She feels lost- just wants to go back to the "burn school".
There is a city by the sea / a gentle company / I don’t suppose you want to