What to Bring When You Leave Everything Behind

My life is suspended between the death of Two Manhattans.

I woke up and immediately understood the earth was dying faster on Wednesday. The sky was orange, the sun red like a wound. It was long past sunrise, and the fog was all wrong. Not fog: smog. And the taste of the air; it was dusty, a kind of dust I remembered from being a child across the towers in New York City. Death dust. The kind that immolates things. Total obliteration. LA skies are so big; the sky is part of why I love this place. Even before I moved here, I always looked up and said, LA invented sunsets. It brags about how it can play with colors in the sky, a flesh of endless canvas. But the death of this place, the burning – it’s like standing under a giant wound. The sky is black, then grey, then haze. A real life sepia layer. It is standing under a giant wound. The ash, it’s like glitter in your palm. So calm, so terrible. Everywhere.

The day did not improve from there.

The logic of evacuation is a cruel one, but it offers clarity when you surrender to it. Not everyone gets to surrender at the same time and sometimes you never do, you stay, and you die, refusing to leave. After all: how do you abandon your life? The things that make up your day? You build a life around things, around big things, around small things. The bedframe you were glad you didn’t have to build, the birdbath you were glad you did, the potted plants you are so confused survive every day in your care. What do you take when you have to leave? For me, the first place I asked this question was while staring at my perfume shelf in front of my desk. I just happened to be there when the first evacuation order was given - and later rescinded. I knew I would take none of it in a split second. Amend that - I would take only the ones I made with my partner, only the ones my friends made me, 1-1’s. Nothing else would be missed. What would never exist again?

I have been the kind of person to prepare for the worst for many years. I have pre-packed go bags with space food in them and filtration straws in them; flashlights at every door and cabinet and next to me in bed. I have books on surviving nuclear holocaust and how to pick locks and how to start fires and have been taught, lovingly, how to survive – not win – a knife fight, how to aim an axe, how to throw sharp things and not miss, how to bind a wound, how to rinse out teargas. These events did not happen all at once like a Michael Bay montage filmed by drones but in a string of singular decisions I made with people I loved over many years. We decided in pieces in all sorts of places: in our apartments, at protests, in the desert after dinner having discussed the fact the world, in fact, was not getting better every day, and that everyone I love in America is vulnerable in escalating ways. Each act of preparation was a prayer in the hopes I would never, ever need to use any of it.

It is good to be prepared.

But it is also not enough, because you can also only be prepared so much in the theory stage of living. The emotions of life will strike you stupid when time is not your friend. Sometimes this means you don’t bring things you are then haunted by when you first evacuate your home. My friend, who has lost everything, everything but his family, is haunted by this. This is stupid. I’ll just have to move them back later, he thought, leaving his guitars in his living room. You leave things sometimes because it’s like bad luck to bring them: it means the loss will happen. This emotion tied to this idea of luck: it is a demon, I think. Regret is as invasive as a fire and it is invisible and it haunts my friends. It is keeping me up, here, writing this at 3AM, the worry that it will possess me too, no matter how much I study it.

I am very, very lucky – so far. I haven’t lost everything yet. The wound in the sky isn’t eating up my neighborhood today, or more specifically this hour, this minute. It was three miles from me when I woke up to the Big Bad; three miles is nothing, eight minutes in no traffic in a car and to nature? To nature? All you need is a dry day, a bad wind, and the loss – the loss – the loss – it is endless, it keeps stretching. I don’t think people outside of this place understand it. How can you? If I weren’t here, I couldn’t, and my imagination is always apocalypse.

Photo by Florian Wehde on Unsplash

But nature, she’s a teacher. She’s made me imagine the entirety of Manhattan obliterated. That isn’t enough. To me, a person who grew up in New York, who remembers seeing the Towers disappear and considered that a kind of End – it isn’t enough. That loss, even that one – you must double it. The entire island, twice, gone, and more. Every place you have ever loved in Harlem and even Hoboken and certainly Chinatown and Central Park and all the libraries and all of it, everything, ashes. Double that. And keep going. That is the amount of loss here. I measure the scale here in Manhattans. There are many Manhattans of loss here. And there is less than a Manhattan between me and the edge of the fires. Once you realize how small the city is, you realize that is way too close. Of course I should run. But so should how many million others.

And we’re all going to what – get on the highway at the same time? The zone of danger keeps fluctuating, but the shadow is down to Tijuana. Do you understand how in the shadow of that, with ashes on our eyelashes, escape feels like a mirage? Helping others is the only way to feel less helpless. And so days go by, doing just that – helping. But the wound in the sky keeps undulating. And I come back home and it feels like a question. The permanence of it is an illusion. My safety a matter of luck and wind.

I have planned for this, I practiced, as I mentioned. But there is trauma in the preparation, in the wait, in the vigilance. In the dead space between Town Halls to hear more about canyon ridges and meteorologist breakdowns and if the water is potable. There is trauma in the attempts to pretend like none of this is happening: I am filing freelance pieces while listening to helicopters and water planes deliver water to fires in the distance. I apologize for delays in responses; in between emails, you see, I am trying to determine how many bags of my entire life I can fit into the back of my car. I am avoiding the “How are You” texts from people I went on dates with eight years ago and trying to see if the road to Vegas is already on fire yet. I am scanning my closet, remembering every place I’ve ever been and the pieces of clothing I brought to remember the experience, and trying to decide which memory will hurt the least to lose.

I am a writer and I would leave so many of my books, almost all of them. I would bring irreplaceable early drafts, my scrapbook, the rings my father gave me and my partner, my wedding dress, my parachute dress. The reality is I would miss everything. I would mourn everything. I am already mourning it. In my imagination, the loss feels like it has already happened. And every minute this week of waiting extends it.

And this particular trauma - I am lucky to have the time to feel it. Half the people I know here do not have the luxury of this calculus.

It is my birthday tomorrow. I have planned nothing. The plans I had feel absurd and disrespectful to have. I want nothing to happen. I want to wake up to a blue sky and the sound of birds. I want to be able to unpack the things I love the most. I want everything I have learned to just be practice.

---

There is a birthday week newsletter sale. This was always planned, but this week I will be considering it my evacuation fund if the winds get worse through Tuesday. Please wish me luck. Thanks.