Lately I have been thinking a lot about a widely attributed appointment to Tennessee Williams: “We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”
When the Palisades fire exploded in January, forcing my teenage daughter and to evacuate from our picturesque Canyon house while my husband was working on the other side of the city, I did my best to gather our most essential items before heading for security. Soaked in a cold and sudden sweat, I grabbed our family's passports, a baby album, my vintage levi, throwing them all to a large silver suitcase.
When my girl and I left Santa Monica, advancing through an obstructed car artery, I felt that she was in a dream: the neighbors aligned in the streets, loading the trunks of their cars, while a huge column of black smoke hunted us in our rearview mirror. Between chatting nervously with my daughter and navigating the roads, it occurred to me that I had forgotten the Reliquary in my grandmother's brass. I had forgotten the photo framed by my husband and I from our honeymoon to Maui decades before. While my daughter tried to calm our two swimming puppies in the back seat, I worried: What else had forgotten to save?
No one knew at that time that what began as a local forest fire would quickly decim our city; A small small town within the largest landscape in Los Angeles and I had no idea that my own life, specifically my marriage and the little family we had created, was about to be burned.
When he chooses to live in Los Angeles, he does it with the understanding that, at some point, it is possible that he should prepare for all types of natural disasters. The earthquakes are the ones that have always scared me. When I was a girl who lived with my mother in Ohio when my father lived in Los Angeles, she used to pray when she went to bed to spend the night. When, at 18, I finally went out west forever, I began to recite the same prayer for myself.
The fires were not so much in my radar, but as it happens, they have the ability to change the earth under the feet of one so drastically. After days of uncertainty, looking at the Firewatch application as slope miles and innumerable numbers of houses were reduced to ashes, we let a collective sigh escape when we knew that our house remained standing. And yet, with all the content of our house devastated by the toxic soot and smoke, we, along with thousands of others, were displaced, forced to find temporary homes.
Five weeks spent in a airbnbs fever summary and air mattresses until, finally, we could ensure a short -term lease contract in our own place. It was a minor miracle in the current market of limited availability and price filling. Standing in the living room of a Hollywood rental without furnished, my husband and I should have collapsed in relief. Instead, we did what any more than 20 years could do: we fight.
“I need a break,” he said, squeezed his jaw.
“What do you mean?” I returned. But after months of couple therapy, I knew exactly what he meant. I needed a break from us or, rather, of me. Our dogs threw incessantly.
I dropped my head into my hands and squeezed hard, a useless attempt to contain chaos in my brain. The tears made their way through the closed tapas, transmitting through my cheeks. When I was a girl who grew up in the 80s, one of my favorite films was “Firestarter”, starring an 8 -year -old boy Drew Barrymore. When he is enraged or overwhelmed, Barrymore's character would begin fires with his mind. I remember feared at that time that I could also have this power, so deep was my pain.
Now, despite the decades of my own internal work, despite the years of actively trying not to be governed by the wounds of my past, I could not avoid detonating at the threat that my husband left me.
But having a child means that even in times of disaster, natural or done, we must continue. As the days went by, I tried to mix our old life with our new spreading our few family photos through the apartment, helping my daughter navigate a new bus route, dealing with insurance adjusters. However, as my husband became more and more distant, I sank into a state of despair.
The loss suddenly seemed everywhere. Beyond the many beloved friends who lost their homes in the fires of Palisades and Altadena, beyond the decimation to our coast once beautiful between Santa Monica and Malibu, I thought about my daughter who would soon go to the university, of my sick father, of my marriage. Unable to eat or sleep, I looked for help. I met my trusted therapist, I sent an email to my spiritual master, I traveled on the road to Orange County to visit my best friend. I also met with a grieving therapist with whom I had worked a decade earlier.
“You have some very real and very important things. But this is not just now. What reminds you of Evan?” He asked, his soft and solidarity voice as he leaned towards the screen that separated us.
Suddenly, I was no longer inactive in my parked car, the phone leaning on my steering wheel. He was 9 years old again, not accompanied in an plane somewhere above the US. While talking about my current experience, I began to understand exactly what had happened between my husband and me the day of our movement; Why he had lashed out so fiercely.
The famous psychologist Richard Schwartz, founder of internal family systems therapy, postulates that our minds are composed of different subpersonalities as a family system. He labels some of these parts in our exiles, wounded beings who have our deepest pain. When my husband questioned our marriage, my exiles, my most fragile and fearful parts felt wildly threatened. It was then that my firefighters, our most reactive and protective parts (and no, irony is not lost in me), broke them to protect them unfortunately in the only way they knew how: through anger.
They were not trying to destroy my marriage; They only tried to prevent once again from experiencing the anguish of being thrown into the world, alone and scared.
Every day for more than a week, I knelt before an improvised altar in my room, I anchored in my breathing and made a feat more herculean: meditations twice a day and one hour duration. Instead of resisting my sadness, I allowed myself to feel it completely, even when this meant soaking my shirt in tears, even when I felt that tears would never stop.
“I can handle my life” it became my new mantra.
When I started experiencing the type of clarity and calm that only meditation can bring, I had a powerful vision: I recently trained to work as a doula, supporting women through labor, reminding them that the most unfathomable pain, in life as in birth, comes just before the new version of themselves can be born.
I considered how, for days in the end, I had cried in the shower, I doubled in anguish. I can't survive this, I would sob my best friend. You will, she insisted.
I begged the Universe to save my suffering, to reverse time, to let me be anywhere other than here.
Like childbirth moms, they do it in a work.
But as I recently remembered, our agony is not the end of the story. It is the threshold. And when we once emerged from the other side, and we always do it, no matter how unlikely our survival seems, we emerge transformed.
After eight endless days, I was surprised: my husband was suffering as deeply as me.
Sitting in front of him in a small wooden table borrowed, I chose to say: “Now I understand. I listen to you. I'm sorry.” Suddenly, he softened. My ability to empathize allowed him to see a door where he once believed that none had existed.
In the end, had love saved? It is such a amorphous and constantly evolution entity; I'm not really sure. Although I certainly wait for him.
But what I know now is that this fire had not come to destroy me; He came to show me what was indestructible. He came to show me that, in fact, I could handle my life.
The author is a writer, Yoga and Doula teacher in Los Angeles, she is working on a memory. She is on Instagram: @evanecooper
Los Angeles Affairs Chronices The search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the Los Angeles area, and we want to listen to their real history. We pay $ 400 for a published essay. Email [email protected]. You can find presentation guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
