James' World 2

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One year ago today, I was blithely going about my business in New York—where I stuck around longer than usual after the holidays to celebrate my dad’s 70th birthday—when I started seeing the Instagram posts about the Los Angeles wildfires.

Like many of us, I’ve become bizarrely accustomed to learning about apocalyptic world news through my feed—but this time, I watched from afar as my friends and neighbors panicked and mourned, and organized in my very own city, the one I was due to fly back to in just a few days.

As social media became crowded with mutual-aid asks and volunteer opportunities, I fielded updates from my partner about the state of our friends’ homes in the Palisades and Altadena and air-quality reports from our own neighborhood in East Hollywood. I did the stupid, trivial-seeming things you do when you’re perfectly safe while your loved ones are across the country, only narrowly avoiding danger; I donated to GoFundMes, I shipped go bag items to my partner’s parents’ house in Orange County (where he drove our dog to escape the worst of the smoke), I googled “dog masks” and cried and felt ridiculous and caught my flight home into a city on fire.

When I picked up my car near my friends’ house in Mar Vista, it was covered in a fine layer of ash. Down the street, a masked neighbor was grimly cleaning the exterior of his own car. We exchanged timid waves, transported for a moment to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when we were all both brought together and increasingly isolated by calamity.

Like COVID, the LA fires weren’t an equalizer so much as a reminder of our city’s stark inequality; the Eaton fire had a disproportionate effect on Altadena’s Black and Latino residents, and a year later, many Angelenos still can’t afford to rebuild their homes. But during those first days and weeks when the fires still raged, I noticed that all of us strangers were a little more primed for reflexive and generic kindness. It’s something I’m noticing still: Warmth, it turns out, isn’t an emergency-situation anomaly.

As I’ve nestled deeper into the fabric of my adopted city, I’ve found endless examples of people building community care into their daily lives—from the dozens of volunteers who cook and distribute food to unhoused Angelenos in MacArthur Park every week to the Altadena Seed Library educators sending seed care packages to families affected by the wildfires. Mutual aid is vital in times of acute, headline-grabbing crisis, yes, but not only then.

Los Angeles has been tested beyond belief since last year. Not only are we still recovering from the wildfires, but ICE raids have rocked the foundation of LA’s immigrant population. Many undocumented workers are now forced to stay home to avoid illegal persecution and arrest, leaving once-populated street corners—where beloved local fruteros sold cups of jicama, mango, and chamoy—empty, and exacerbating our city’s already-acute housing crisis as some immigrants struggle to pay rent. I’ve seen a lot of people leave LA over the past year, burned out by trauma, an increasingly dried-up job market, or just the soaring cost of just about everything. Many of them are lifelong Angelenos with a lot more claim on the city than I’ll ever have—so when my long-term relationship ended in the fall, a lot of the people I love assumed I’d be one of them.

But I still believe in LA. I want to stay and fight and organize in this city, doing jail support and court-watching with the LA Tenants Union and visiting my community dye bath. I feel strongly that where you live shouldn’t be just an accident of birth or a perk of privilege. It should be a choice—one you make anew every day and one that’s strengthened by the ties you knit to the community that built it.

“What’s keeping you in LA?” a well-meaning friend asked in the wake of my breakup. When I thought about the answer, what I saw was a rush of images: of walking my dog through Hollywood in a sea of hot pink bougainvillea petals, perusing old editions of Gourmet at my favorite used-cookbook store in Long Beach, drunkenly feasting on bacon-wrapped “danger dogs” from the cart outside Akbar, walking the Silver Lake Reservoir while pointing out squirrels to my friend’s eight-month-old, gossiping with my friend Sarah as we bought up bags of pasta at FoodTown for weekend distro at MacArthur Park. As a transplant, I’m still learning how to be the best resident I can be, but of the seven cities that I’ve lived in over the course of my life—and after the last year in LA—I can truly say that I’ve never been prouder to call somewhere home.

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Photo: Getty Images

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