fire

Helpless. I feel helpless as we fly away from my home. In hushed tones, passengers console each other. They speculate about the damage, about their city. Like me, their eyes are glued to the window.

Swathes of the city are encased in darkness. At this high up, it's difficult to distinguish the cause. Is that the billowing smoke? The power outages? Or just the trail the fire left behind?

The Palisades fire.

God has a plan, they say. He holds the hands of those who suffer, they say. I play God in my comfortable airplane seat: what is His reason? Perhaps the flames are flares, warning signs that even one of the largest cities in the nation is not immune to the effects of climate change, a crisis we created. Perhaps He is here to punish us. Perhaps He is teaching us resilience.

Before we take off, my father messages me that several of his projects burned down in Altadena. I pray for the people who called those projects home. I imagine the time, the money, the engineering, the heart poured into these places. Home will live for the next fifty to one hundred years. Home will withstand that next big earthquake we've been waiting for. Home will keep you safe.

Those projects did not even last twenty years. In an industry committed to building a resilient tomorrow, our efforts are futile. Futile against the natural disasters of today, of the ones we saw years ago.

When we left our evacuation hotel this morning, a familiar smell filled my lungs. Ashes danced around me and adorned my hair, snowflakes in a grey sky. I messaged my freshman year roommates. Remember when we experienced this before? We were scared; we were only eighteen. Berkeley's classes just got cancelled. We sat together in the living room, watching as fires waved in the skyline.

Leaving our evacuation hotel. Above us, smoke from the Palisades. In front of us, smoke from Eaton.

We land, and that familiar cool breeze brushes the ashes off my hair. The weather is eerily calm, the drone of fire trucks nowhere to be heard. In front of me lies sleepy San Francisco, winding down for the night, with soft clouds blanketing the bay. But when I close my eyes, I see those Los Angeles flames, dancing mesmerizingly, small pixels in my bird's-eye view.