Like Charcoal in the Sand

I went to the beach for the first time in 2025. I’ve been displaced inland. I didn’t realize how much I’d been avoiding until I was standing there.

My feet touched the ocean water. I saw the Santa Monica Pier. I breathed the beach air into my lungs.

I wasn’t expecting it to hurt.

The sand is full of charcoal.

Is that normal? Was it always there, and I simply never noticed? Or is it actually charcoal, still there a year later, mixed into the shoreline by time and tide, raked and folded into the sand through repeated grooming.

I don’t know the answer.

But it stopped me.

Even if the sand always had charcoal, trauma changes how familiar places register in the nervous system.

That’s what this year has been like.

On the surface, things look normal. The word fire comes up less and less. Things look cleaner.

But if anyone pokes around just a little, it's still there. It is still very much there.

They’ve been telling us that January 7th is coming for the entire second half of 2025. It’s a performative opportunity for many, but for those of us living this experience, it’s less of a milestone.

• When you find some version of stability and routine again.

• When remediation is complete and your soil or your home come back safe.

• When you walk through your Palisades front door with the intention of staying.

• When you sit in your native garden and wave to passing neighbors who stopped to admire it.

Those are real milestones.

We are past exhaustion. Past shock. Past waiting for clarity that never really came.

Things are moving. They have been moving with or without us since the very beginning.

Foundations are being poured. Decisions are being locked in. Landscapes are being altered. Systems that failed us once are quietly reasserting themselves, because momentum favors whatever is easiest, cheapest, fastest, and least questioned.

This is the moment where recovery stops being theoretical and starts becoming permanent. We will continue to be as loud as we can for the communities impacted by the Palisades–Malibu and Eaton Fires, naming the places and people that are being folded out of the story.

As Team Palisades would say,

We're coming home.