Maybe I should have known because the first thing I noticed that day was that the sky looked wrong. The light had a strange quality. I looked up at the trees and swore the edges of their leaves radiated silver. (In Los Angeles you’re always paying attention to the light. Light in Los Angeles represents freedom.) Everything felt off.
The National Weather Service had warned us for days. Unusually high winds – those famed Santa Anas – combined with extremely dry conditions (it hasn’t rained in Los Angeles since May 5) meant the risk of fire was especially high. The first fire, the Palisades, started on January 7 at 10.30 am. And yet I went to sleep relatively easily that evening, no go bag packed. I’d removed it from my to-do list last year, as I had the two gallons of water I’d kept in my car in case of emergency for more than a year, if not two. I don’t know why I suddenly felt like I didn’t need them. I’d felt a little ridiculous, a little like a prepper. I told myself things would never get that bad.
The wind was already lifting everything up as I left for work that morning. The bamboo trees on my patio swayed and swayed until they finally fell. But it didn’t alarm me. It was nothing I hadn’t seen before.
The winds lessened as I drove south for work. The sun glowed blood-red beneath the smoke. The second fire, the Eaton, had started in Altadena the previous evening. I checked in on friends who lived nearby in Pasadena.
Devastation moved as quickly as fire. Someone got a call that the house up the street from them burnt down. Ten minutes later they found out theirs was gone, too. Then another neighbour. Then a coworker. A friend. Another, and another. Entire lifetimes vanished in seconds. The day began to feel increasingly apocalyptic, each hour begetting more chaos.

When I returned home from work that afternoon – three hours earlier than I was meant to – I knew I had to start packing.
I was packing and on the phone with my mum when the Sunset Fire started. My boyfriend interrupted me to tell me we had to go; I told my mum I was getting a work call and would call her back. I didn’t want to scare her.
Everything crystallised in the five minutes I had to get out. I took my jewellery, a file folder with my passport and other personal documents, three hard drives, clothes, and all of my journals. I returned for the journals. I couldn’t carry them with everything else so I decided to move my car closer to the front of my apartment building to save time. I will never forget the moment I walked out and saw the smoke from Runyon Canyon hovering over my street. The street I’d crossed and driven down hundreds of times, whose fixed certainty I’d never questioned, had given little thought to. I had to take a picture, I told myself, although I’d yelled inside my car that morning at the idiots who’d slowed down traffic to record the smoke from the fires on their phones. My hands shook so hard that when I pulled up the photo later to show people all you could see was a haze of white, orange and blue.
When do you know you can no longer deny reality? Is it when danger finally has a face, slides up next to you, holds out its hand? Not that future, I had foolishly thought. Not here. Not now. That future was for other, faraway places. This was Los Angeles, where you could always dream because there was always someone willing to take a bet on it, or die for it, or something in between. There’s a price to pay for all that freedom. All of us had done it by choosing to live in this fake, stolen paradise. To live in Los Angeles is to be a willful participant in a kind of madness. One can’t help it; it’s the light, the endless sprawl, the feeling like anything can happen.
“To live in Los Angeles is to be a willful participant in a kind of madness. One can’t help it; it’s the light, the endless sprawl, the feeling like anything can happen” – Elodie Saint-Louis

When I returned to Hollywood two days later the streets looked suspiciously normal. There was nothing clearly strange except that it was quieter than usual. I walked past a row of abandoned Christmas trees on the sidewalk and imagined them burning. Although there had been a few spot fires, a guard said, the park would open that Monday.
Los Angeles will be a different city after this, but I also suspect in many ways it will be the same. Some will leave but many will stay, choosing to rebuild rather than start over again. The process will be arduous and financially devastating for most, a minor inconvenience for some. And the fires will come and the cycle will continue because we never learn our lesson in Los Angeles; history repeats itself again and again.
Will the city be able to meet this crisis in the long term? I don’t know. But I’ve been heartened by the generosity and action I’ve witnessed in the days since the fires began. It’s been a reminder of the potential for people power, that we can create energy through our collective collaboration and movement. But our politics tend to be shortsighted in this country and I worry about the long term. I worry that people can’t understand the impact of a catastrophe until it touches them directly. Until it’s too late.
There is no going back. This is our new normal. Not just for those living in California but across the globe. It’s happening and has been happening and will continue to happen: the fires and the floods, the extreme weather patterns. It’s no longer our future but our lived reality. I myself didn’t feel this until I saw that cloud of smoke and realised I could lose everything.

I drove through the city and remembered I loved it. I went to a gallery and looked over Hollywood. I saw palm trees and shit-stained sidewalks and those delivery robots you see all the time now, the ones that remind me, once again, that we are living in the future. If the fire hit Sunset that would have been the end, everyone keeps saying. I can’t imagine all of it ruined: the Chinese Theatre and the grimy stars, or God forbid, the Bowl.
And then David Lynch died eight days later, patron saint of the light in Los Angeles, capturer of Los Angeles’s id. It felt like the end of an era. The death of a dream.