Yahoo Lifestyle “Is That My Room? Like, Just Fully in Flames?”
I don’t know the melting point of a coffee mug is, but it’s gotta be hot.
It was 11 days after the fire took our house, and I was back at school. I’m a sophomore at UC-Santa Cruz. My parents and my younger brother were back in Altadena, sifting through the ashes, wearing work boots because otherwise you’re going to get nails in your shoes. They found my mom’s favorite coffee mug. It was broken in half—it looked like it had just exploded in the heat. It has a bear on it and it says Yosemite. It’s a running joke in the family that no one is allowed to touch that mug.
My brother found the electric mixer—or at least one of the beaters that we used to lick cake batter off when we were little. He sent me a pic. “Found this!”
It was funny, and just weird.
I’m lucky that I have so much of my stuff at school. I have survivor’s guilt, I think, because I have most of my clothes, my schoolbooks, my computer, my phone. My Day One teddy bear, from when I was a baby, is up here with me. It has the same name as my mom’s teddy bear from when she was little: Boo Boo Bear. Her Boo Boo Bear didn’t make it. It was in my bedroom in Altadena.
I have a birthday card or two in my school apartment, but most sentimental stuff was back at the house. All my yearbooks from high school, with the nicest messages everyone wrote. Physical photos. I collected CDs from this one K-pop band I love, Stray Kids—I had a psycho number of albums in my room. The CDs had posters in them that I collected. All my books. My stuffed animals.
I have this one thing—the most thoughtful gift I’ve ever received was a custom-made bag and book from my friend. The bag had a map of Altadena with our initials on it, and inside was a homemade book with printed-out pictures of us and little notes like, “Remember this?” She made it for my 17th birthday.
That’s gone.
Backing up.
The first call had come 12 days before—the night before the fire. My mom and I talk and text all the time, but she sounded serious. Like, “You need to look at the news. Palisades High burned down.” I just thought, Whoa, that’s crazy. I knew people who went there, but it was far away from where we lived. It was crazy, but it also felt sort of distant.
Then she said, “There’s actually another fire kind of near our house, and we might get evacuated.” Again, I said, Oh, okay, that’s scary—but still, kind of whatever. Typical evacuation warning. We’ve lived in our house for something like 12 years, and we’ve gotten evacuation warnings in the past. We never had to actually evacuate.
Plus, when you’re away at college, it’s your whole world. Not that I’m not aware of world events and don’t pay attention—I definitely am, and I definitely do. But you have classes and assignments and friends and meals and homework—all the things you have to deal with in an immediate way.
I went to sleep.
“We’ve gotta talk” was the text I work up to the next morning before class.
I just thought maybe there was some other fire news somewhere in the city she wanted to tell me about. My brain was just not going to my house. I called her while I was brushing my teeth and she said, “I don’t want to freak you out before class, but our house is in a scary zone.” My parents and my younger brother had ended up evacuated the night before—a first—and my mom was saying, “We’ve heard rumors. It’s bad up there.”
And I’m still saying, “Okay, well, keep me posted.” Our house had been in a “scary zone” before.
My roommates and I turned on the news, and it was all just Altadena, Altadena. My town. I started to get worried.
Later that day my mom called me again. She said, “Please don’t freak out. The house is gone.”
And I just started—
I burst into tears.
I’m a pre-med biology major. I’m taking organic chemistry right now. Attendance in my classes is mandatory. I pulled it together because I had a couple hours before class, and I was in such a daze—kind of robotic—that I actually went. But I have no idea what happened in class that day. I was on my computer, just scrolling through pictures and videos.
At that point I had not seen any pictures of our house. This was before they brought in all the National Guard and police and everything to close off the streets—that was not a thing yet. Our neighbor had gone up at 6 a.m. the next morning, while the fires were still burning, to see if he could get some stuff from his house. But the whole street was already gone.
He took a video of our house. Part of my bedroom was still on fire. I watched it multiple times thinking, Is that my room? Like, just fully…in flames? And of course it was my room—I knew it was—but it didn’t make sense. It was odd, almost disorienting. That is not what it should look like.
One of my good friends here at college is from home—I’ve known her forever. She lives on my street, and actually she’s also named Lucy. We were texting and she also lost her house. I called her and was like, We gotta get lunch or something. I met up with her and another kid I’ve been friends with since kindergarten who also happens to go to Santa Cruz. His house was okay, but his whole street gone. And we all just got lunch and sat there saying, This is the worst.
That was kind of how that first day went.
The day after, I did a six-hour Lego set that I had gotten for Christmas and just didn’t talk to anyone. Thank God I took it up to school.
Those first few days, I was on autopilot. Just doing my Lego set, ignoring my homework. I couldn’t do anything. My roommates bought me a teddy bear with chocolates from the grocery store, which was funny and sweet.
Eventually I emailed my teachers—I was hesitant at first because I didn’t want them to think, She’s using this to get out of work. But I just wrote, Hey, I’m having the hardest time on earth focusing on classes. It’s really not my top priority. And they all said the same thing: Totally cool. Email us if you need extensions.
I’m a pretty good student. I get my stuff in on time. I get pretty good grades. But even now, a couple weeks later, I’ve been forgetting the tiniest things. I show up to classes at the wrong time. I’m forgetting to do missing assignments—and I never do that. My head’s been in a totally different place. I’m like, I’m soooo sorry, I didn't realize this was the day this was due.
And they’re like, You’re good.
My brother came up to visit me that first week. He’s only a year and a half younger than me, and we’re close. He’s taking it the same way as me where he can be positive and make jokes about it and function, but he’s devastated.
I said, Just come up here. Nobody is really talking about the fires here, and most people have no idea what I’m going through because I'm not really broadcasting it, like, Feel bad for me! So he came up and we did our normal routine: He went to my classes with me, we got lunch with my friends. We went shopping, got him a bunch of clothes—including Santa Cruz merch, of course—because he had lost everything.
He’s a big vinyl collector, and he had so, so many records. He had the covers displayed on his bedroom wall, and then a whole big box. All gone. Went to a vinyl store while he was here and he got two or three records to restart his collection. I think was a good trip for him.
We have—we had—a ring camera. At one point I asked my mom if there was any chance it had captured video of the fire. But the power cut out before it even got to our house. Which is probably good, because that would have been super horrifying to see.
But also really interesting!
That’s where my mind goes. I think of those aerial images on the news, where you can see that a whole mountain is on fire, or all the streets. But on my own personal level, I think of my mom’s teddy bear on fire. I think of my bedroom on fire. Our couch, our whole living room, our carpet, you know? What did it look like? Was there any chance some of our stuff survived? Just what-ifs. I picture it and think, There was a moment in time when I could have seen that whole house just engulfed in flames.
Seeing the Army guys in our neighborhood when we went to see the house was incredibly weird.
I flew home from school nine days after the fire. My parents and brother were living in a temporary place, and it was good for me to see that, so I could visualize where they were and not imagine them on the streets or something.
We were all super eager to see the house—we still call it the house, even though there is no house left—so my parents and I went on a mission to drive up into the neighborhood.
It was pretty clear that we were technically not super-supposed to be there. We drove up to the checkpoint and showed our IDs to this guy in a camouflage uniform and said, “Hi, we live close by.” I don’t think he knew the area that well. We just said, Yeah, We’re just a little way down that block. And he said, Okay, you can go through.
We got lucky.
We drove up Morango, the street we always take, and all the houses were gone. Not on TV this time. Right in front of our eyes. I started tearing up. I’m thinking, Oh, God, it’s gonna be bad when we pull up next to ours and it’s real. I was at least glad I had seen the photo and video before going in person.
We pulled up across the street and walked down the driveway and I just started bawling, shaking in my mom’s arms. We just looked at everything, staring, for I don’t know how long.
After we caught our breath, we started exploring, trying to find any pieces of anything. We found the logo of the Nissan, melted off. I thought, Wow, that’s interesting—as if it was some kind of artifact. I had been thinking that the metal of the car probably melted a bit, but that some of the stuff we had in the trunk probably made it. Nope. No. The car is a shell. Horrifying. Creepy.
There were still dishes in the dishwasher. Ceramic dishes and bowls, half-melted.
My dad and I later went to one of the donation-center locations, which they’ve set up around the city. We didn’t know if there might be anything they might need. He said he was in the market for a baseball hat, but we looked and looked through the bags and stuff on the tables that the volunteers had set up and sorted through donations from people all over L.A. They didn’t have any hats.
A few hours later I flew back up to school. One of the first things I did was buy a UC-Santa Cruz hat and send it to my dad.
I’ve had weird dreams about it all. I’m pretty extroverted, and I’ve been trying to keep a positive attitude as much as you can. I mean, it sucks. I’ll have moments, like before I go to bed, when the day finally slows down and I’ll get sad about it. So I listen to nice music, and that always puts me to bed.
One of my mom’s friends from her old work reached out and asked for all of our clothing and shoe sizes so she could go out and buy us a bunch of clothes. My mom told me that and I started crying.
My parents recently had a big meeting with other parents of my friends, and my brother’s friends, about all the questions. Is everyone moving away? Are people going to rebuild there? For us, I think the plan is to try to rebuild as fast as we can. They asked me for my vote, and I said 100 percent yes. Best case scenario, it sounds like maybe we could be in there within five years. Maybe four years. It would look different. I know that. But I love that street, I love those neighbors, I love the whole area. I hope most people will try to rebuild because pretty much everyone we know is from Altadena.
I’m trying to be positive, because that’s the only thing you can really control: your mindset. And I’m really trying. My whole family has been really honest with each other. I can call them all and say, I’m depressed today. I’ll be walking to class and I’ll just start thinking about the house, or I’m doing homework and I can’t concentrate because I’m wondering, What’s my family up to? What’s the new apartment going to look like? I’m doing my best, but you can’t be at your best 100 percent of the time. And my mom or dad will say, You know what? I’m having a hard day too. There’s not a ton you can do about it, but go make yourself some pasta. Or order out some good food. Live your life, make it good.
And friends—I know a tight group of friends is tough to find, but I have one, and that helps so much. I wake up and say, I do not want to do this today. And my roommates just say, You got this! When we get home, we’ll make brownies and watch music videos. We’ll watch a movie. It’s gonna be okay.
The other thing that’s helping a lot is having things to look forward to—just little wins to focus on. I’ve got a package coming today! Or this is a big one: At the end of May, that band I love, Stray Kids, are playing a concert. Honestly, if Sofi Stadium burns down, I will lose my mind.
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