Oh, how disorienting it was to come across a street our mind used to perceive as an urban landscape filled with stylish bungalows surrounded by well-maintained gardens, now empty, a forsaken wasteland covered in a thick layer of white-grey ashes, punctuated only by brick chimneys, most of which have survived the inferno. What stunning, multifaceted irony.

Burned out car-bodies silent witnesses to the havoc the volatile fires wreaked while putting ‘2025’ on our documents and letters hadn’t even become automatic yet. A stone entryway, still decorated with Christmas lights, now an introvert black instead of shiny and colored, all that remained of what must’ve been a lovely home only a couple of weeks ago. Upon entering the Palisades on Sunset, we were no longer greeted by the quirky blue house decorated with iridescent dolphins, symbol of the Palisades and mascot of Palisades Charter High School. The bleak destruction that replaced this neighborhood brought tears to my eyes upon beholding it for the first time. It was the scene of a nightmare that wouldn’t evaporate at dawn’s advent.

Bestowed with the ambiguous right of entry, we waited warily at the check point to be let into what could only be described as a warzone, making the presence of military personnel only natural. Soldiers and police thoroughly inspected all who wanted to enter, but we, with our big red resident pass on the dash board that branded us as ‘the affected’, were let in automatically. A dubious privilege. Because our condominium was right in the middle of the disaster area, we were granted access to behold the place we started to call home less than six months ago. Our apartment building was still standing, miraculously, and we were lucky to be able to access our belongings, but we lost our home just as much as the people whose house had been reduced to ashes.

By no means do I intend to downplay the heartbreak and despair losing a home of thirty or forty years, a lifetime, inflicts; plenty of people lost their childhood, the place where their kids grew up. And not just in Pacific Palisades. Altadena, another wonderful, small scale neighborhood with the mountains in their backyard, just like the Palisades, but on the other end of LA, was hit even harder. Our situation is incomparable to the one they’re facing, and my heart goes out to all of those who are struggling to rebuild their lives. But there was no way we could live in our apartment, not for a long time. The air was loitering smoke, rich in toxic airborne components, and most surrounding structures were no more than heaps of rubble. The house behind us, with its meticulously maintained garden, its verdurous beauty so dense we could never see beyond it, we can now behold as a skeleton of the villa that had been hidden from us before.  It will be months before anyone gets to inhabit our neighborhood again. And even then, it’s going to be a far cry from the lush surroundings we loved so much.

Inside, though mostly intact except for some broken and melted windows, the specter of the destructive fire was palpable. An acrid smell of the cremation of many lives had forced itself into every corner, every fiber of our clothes and newly purchased furniture. The lemon-yellow citrus juicer on the kitchen counter, covered in a layer of black soot, the remains of burned wooden structures, electronics, paint and furniture, was a silent symbol of our broken adventure.

Over the Christmas holidays, our kind landlord had replaced almost all appliances in our kitchen. It added insult to injury for him, whose home of many years had been consumed entirely, and the poignancy of seeing the brand-new oven and stove, now covered in ashes, destined for months of inaction, hit us hard.

Except for the occasional disaster relief worker assessing damage or employee of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power repairing electricity poles, Pacific Palisades has turned into a ghost-town. From a lively and green sun kissed village where people knew and greeted each other and full or semi-celebs could be seen perusing the Sunday farmer’s market, it has become a desolate wasteland reeking like a diseased fireplace.

As the fires raged, accounts were contradictory and unreliable, and ‘RIP Palihigh’ got a social media page, so we were led to believe Leone’s school was gone. Although the school is by no means unscathed by the Palisades inferno, we were now relieved to see that the largest part of the campus survived. Nevertheless, attending classes there won’t be possible until the beginning of the new school year in September, and so the educators had to resort to COVID-19-tainted online schooling. It wasn’t great then, and it’s still a far cry from being in a classroom physically.

Since we couldn’t stay in our own apartment, I had to find an Airbnb, without a clue as to the length of our projected stay. When our week in the tiny room was up, we were tired of scrambling over our splayed suitcases and getting on each other’s nerves, but we’d hardly begun to figure out what to do. Mainly, we just wanted to go home, a place that no longer existed. Although we were and are in a very privileged situation and unfamiliar with the desperation that is the daily reality of people living on Skid Row, we were truly displaced and had the dubious opportunity of experiencing what it’s like to be homeless. A piece of confounding irony presented itself to me: homelessness in Los Angeles is an important theme in my first novel. My writings have the troubling tendency of coming true.

Not having a home to go to, even if it has only been yours for five months, is not a great feeling. It’s unsettling. Life can be, often is, uncertain, and a home is sometimes the only thing that roots you. Not being able to place your belongings in a closet, sleep in your own bed, have your own space. To retreat from the world. I guess it’s why I never really believed in weekend or one-week holidays. I usually went along, because you did like short trips, and it wasn’t like they weren’t fun, they were. But to me, the superfluous and disruptive work it requires to pack, leave your own house in the right order, getting care for a possible pet, all for a week in a replacement home which you need to vacate again the moment you start to more or less settle, isn’t really worth all that. And with kids, it’s even worse.

When I lived in Los Angeles as an adolescent, except for a three-day outing to Las Vegas that was initiated by fellow students, I never took trips. Not because I was working too hard, but because I felt I already was in the best place I could be.

However, one of the many gifts we received from the city of LA was a stay at the Beverly Hilton hotel, a place where a long time ago, when I was fully living my rock-n-roll life, I made some crazy memories that inspired its presence in my first novel. Although we really just wanted to go home, staying at this luxurious hotel for free was a great present, not in the least because of the kindness of the staff. People with names like Princess, Lucio and Alfredo, with their encouraging words and sincerity, made us actually feel at home and cared for.

Nonetheless, the reality started dawning on me that, after having done so much work to create a life for us in the USA, I had to leave my favorite place of residency once again. My search for another school for Leone, I wanted to save her from months of deficient online education, had not been successful. Prestigious schools would not take on a student in eleventh grade halfway through the year.  The choice of just any public school that will take her is one I entertained for a brief moment. However, it would mean getting familiar in another school again, making new friends again, finding her groove, choosing her subjects. Again. She has less than a year and a half of secondary education left. Leone’s school career and life have already been disrupted way too many times for someone her age, so when she asked me to go back to Ibiza, to a school where she has friends, where she knows the teachers and heads, where she feels at home, I could not but concede. And even though I felt a profound sadness at leaving our life in California behind, the decision brought me relief as well.

During all this, your father’s health had been in rapid decline, and everyone was aware the end was near. We ended up bidding him farewell on facetime, but knowing the outcome, and thanks to our delayed return to Los Angeles, fortunately we had said goodbye to him in person several times already. I panicked at not being able to be there for his passing or his funeral, and although I set out to try, I soon realized there was no way I could manage emptying out our apartment and everything else that came with our hasty evacuation from LA in time. He has left us now, leaving a blank space that we will need to fill up with memories and love for this temperamental, emotional, vivacious and altruistic man.

In addition to our retreat, we also had to prepare for Robin’s return. Although it took her some time to root in LA (I fear me being there as a continuous backup plan didn’t help), she had already clearly felt its draw. Could love for a place be genetic? I guess it’s probably epigenetic. Anyway, my news of leaving Los Angeles did not land well with her.

It’s not easy trying to do the best for all involved, but I think I figured it out, although I’m still unsure of my own place in this equation, beside the one of space holder. Robin and I decided that it would be very possible for her to travel back to California after we went to see our family to mourn your Dad, so that’s when we began planning for her to return to LA at the same time Leone and I would travel to Ibiza. This involved things like finding her a room with a roommate, and getting her the license to drive in my car, which she would need to sell at the end of her extension. What all of the above required was for Robin to make a huge jump into independency, and I can’t deny we were both a bit intimidated by this step. Also, because this would mean that she was moving out, and we would physically stop being ‘three’ for the first time since your death.

Getting our apartment cleaned out was a challenge for several reasons. First of all, the area our condo is in has restricted access. I wanted to donate our things to the Salvation Army, but they weren’t allowed to come and pick them up, so I ended up taking many of our possessions to the center myself. A part of our household effects I deemed unusable for anyone but us, so I arranged for them to be picked up by the only type of company that was allowed inside the area: debris removal. So the cat-tree I bought for Jazz just before Christmas so he wouldn’t be too bored without us around, was one of the objects taken away by the Junkluggers.

Then there was the time pressure. We had accepted the fact we would not be able to attend your Dad’s funeral, but now that we knew that Leone was going back to her school in Ibiza, it was important for her to start as soon as possible, having missed three quarters of the material she’s supposed to learn this year, year twelve in the British school system.

The third aspect that made this process hard was on an emotional level. None of us were able to stay in our apartment for longer than an hour or so. Surely this could be attributed to the physical discomfort of breathing burned air (or the face masks we wore to keep this out, another horrid throwback to COVID-19 times), but the emotional intensity of saying goodbye to our life there, apparent in the different breadcrumbs it had left behind, the smallest usually the most painful, played a big part in it. The piece of art-on-cloth Robin and I found at a Halloween gathering of her musician and artist friends. The coffee beans from a small independent grower, bought at a Venice market, business cards from promising contacts, the gigantic pinecones I gathered in Forest Falls I had not yet put on display.

Despite the sadness I felt at leaving Los Angeles behind, a sense of gratitude prevails. I remain deeply impressed by the help that was offered by a wide variety of organizations, such as the Red Cross, FEMA, the Tzu Chi Buddhist organization, and the flood of sympathetic words and gestures and gifts we received. Oswaldo, Meggan and Jessie, who rescued and cared for our cat without asking anything in return. I’m grateful for our lovely neighbors in Villa Bella, I wish I’d gotten to know them better. The sense of community in Pacific Palisades, the stunning nature we got to experience right in our backyard, the coyotes we met when we left Yamashiro, our final evening in LA. I’m very grateful for Robin’s new roommate, who’s proven so trusting and trustworthy, who already helped us and her out so much. I’m grateful for our stay at the condo even though it was cut way too short, grateful to Claire for helping me find it, grateful to Mark for letting us live there. I feel an inundating gratitude to all the people that helped us settle in LA, who were willing to work around the bureaucracy a bit to make things easier for us, for the kindness we found everywhere.

On the other hand, I want to give thanks to the island of Ibiza for always being there as a refuge. How many times has it taken us in when life throws us serious punches? I’m starting to lose count. Then there is Morna International College, welcoming our daughters every single time we come crawling back. A constant is my gratitude for the unwavering support and love of our family, a condition without which we could never do the things we do, take the steps we take, live in the places we do. It’s because of them, and our friends, in the Netherlands, in Spain, and now in Los Angeles too, that we, in spite of everything, always feel at home and anchored.

Perhaps most of all, I feel so fortunate for having been, for being, a part of Los Angeles. Not everyone understands this, I know, but I have such love for the city; its mad passion, its creativity, its colors, its tolerance, its nature, all of which combine to exude an exciting energy, pregnant with promise, that never fails to inspire me. Even the short time we were there, it gave us more than we could have ever gotten elsewhere in the same time frame. The ocean, mountains, dolphins, hummingbirds, cybertrucks, Will Wood, Mitski, Sting, Alexander Hamilton, the best handrolls we ever tasted (hint: they’re in Westwood), The Whisky a Gogo where we watched friends perform, art galleries in downtown, Halloween, Thanksgiving, The haunted hayride, the Teragram ballroom, inflated egos, those without egos, homeless people, people with dreams, award ceremonies, Disneyland, bonfires on the beach, high school, celebrity schoolmates, traffic jams, earthquakes, and finally, wildfires. That I got to show our kids all this, live Los Angeles with them, is something I will always cherish.

As we withdraw our physical presence from this cauldron of diversity and dreams, I believe the bonds have persisted, intensified even. Not just in me, but in our children as well. My beloved Sunset Boulevard, paved with past and future memories, blows me promises on the wind like kisses, of a little more patience that will be rewarded. And when we’re at LAX, lugging our nine suitcases that hold the remains of our life plus our too big cat in his too small carrier, I know, this is not the end.