Lucky Me. The day after my 32nd birthday, after the night of a full blue moon (pisces in my 12th house), I wake up to the smell of smoke.
I look out at my very-own-private-view of Downtown Los Angeles. The skyline’s silty, in an unfamiliar way. Not the usual haze of old B-roll from the 80’s.
I placed a birthday bouquet on the sill outside of my window where it floats above what once was detached fire escape. However the emergency ladder has been removed, so it’s not much more than an risky balcony. The smoke seemed to simmer, like the flame was fresh. Perhaps, the wax paper the warped and sparked, the apartment’s on fire. In a fire, does something always escape?
The night before at the birthday dinner, My friend handed over the bouquet. Lilies intermixed with leaves of kale. My friend apologized for the lilies on account of my cat, and it occurred to me that the bouquet might not have been meant for me. She’d just gotten engaged a day or two earlier.
The white now wilts in the heat with crimping and crinkling edges. My father sends a text and I learn there was a fire on Los Angeles Street, a block or two down.
My father links me an article of it, and then forwards a birthday email. I scan it to read there’s giftcard in the mail to my current favorite retailer, REI because, of course, there’s no better way to feel close to nature than to loiter for an hour at the chain location in Burbank to only leave with one packaged, freeze-dried ice cream sandwich.
Playfully, I ask my dad what he thinks I should do with money.
"Invest in a pair of approach shoes, something with a rock plate, waterproof boots with toe guards. Who cares." That’s right, feel nothing and live freely. Father like daughter. I want to aspire to be through-hiker Barbie one day.
"What ever makes you happy," my father says.
I end up ordering a pair of trail runners on sale for the fire roads around Elysian. If those are fire access road exactly. They’re paved and often cars curl around the peaks at questionable speeds. I won’t be annoying about it, no one cares and it doesn’t hurt anyone what you where on your feet during a run.
Everday, I take two pills to live with my cat as I’m allergic, one is for the allergy and another for the anxiety of the allergy. My cat resists taking a syringe of steroids in his wet food every morning, all to live in this apartment I chose at the center of the city where we've both wound up. His asthma’s agitated by the smoke today. When I once asked the vet why the steriod was bubblegum flavor, he couldn’t answer. He deflected instead, noting many felines in the los angeles basin suffer from asthma, and that at some point, I might consider moving above the treeline.
Decades ago, my father sold his house in Reseda to live in the mountains, although he remained employed by LA county. He commuted 4 hours each way from Mammoth Lakes for week long shifts at a firestation in South Central. “A long drive sure, but you make room for the things you want.”
My cat lays his ass on the sand dollars I laid out to dry on a paper towel on my desk. I glance out the window again, and the sky is as clearer as it ever could be. I think to chuck the sand dollars out into the courtyard of my building or up towards the Library tower. I collected 175 intact specimens at Morro the weekend before. My cat crushes a few underpaw during a fit of coughs. My eyes itch and welt. This smoke reminds me of when we were kids and didn’t know better than to dispose of our plastic waterbottles in the firepit as the adults packed up the campsite.
Further proof, I’m lucky: my mother texts that she won another $500 from a scratcher. HAPPY BIRTHDAY. She’s peeled some 5K over the past two months. She first met my father when she was living in the valley and working at a hospital downtown, not far from where I live now. I recently learned that, in fact, my father had already moved to Mammoth when they started dating. My father relayed this fact causually, just the way he’d done over a decade ago, dropping me off at the college on the CSU Fullerton campus for the first and last time: “Yeah, your mom was married to some other Angeleno before me.”
No one should have to outlive the injustice of their own existence, or is that notion an intolerable source of personal resentment not worth the snuff. Life is short, after all. Feel nothing and live freely. I wonder for how the longer Fire burned. I search the web for details of the incident. A warehouse, but full of what.
“You know, when you were in the womb, she had a full-blown gambling addiction. Sat at the slots and all night after her shift at St. Mary’s, ‘cause back then we were living in Truckee, she worked at catholic hospital in Reno and stayed off the mountain between shifts, killing time. A short walk across the street to the casino.”