I don't know the melting point of a coffee mug is, but it's gotta be hot.
It was 11 days after the fire took our house, and I was back at school. I'm a sophomore at UC-Santa Cruz. My parents and my younger brother were back in Altadena, sifting through the ashes, wearing work boots because otherwise you're going to get nails in your shoes. They found my mom's favorite coffee mug. It was broken in half—it looked like it had just exploded in the heat. It has a bear on it and it says "Yosemite." It's a running joke in the family that no one is allowed to touch that mug.
My brother found the electric mixer—or at least one of the beaters that we used to lick cake batter off of when we were little. He sent me a pic: "Found this!" It was funny...and just weird.
I'm lucky that I have so much of my stuff at school. I have survivor's guilt, I think, because I have most of my clothes, my schoolbooks, my computer, my phone. My day one teddy bear, from when I was a baby, is up here with me. It has the same name as my mom's teddy bear from when she was little: Boo Boo Bear. Her Boo Boo Bear didn't make it. It was in my bedroom in Altadena.
I have a birthday card or two in my school apartment, but most sentimental stuff was back at the house. All my yearbooks from high school, with the nicest messages everyone wrote. Physical photos. I collected CDs from this one K-pop band I love, Stray Kids—I had a psycho number of albums in my room. The CDs had posters in them that I collected. All my books. My stuffed animals.
I have this one thing—the most thoughtful gift I've ever received was a custom-made bag and book from my friend. The bag had a map of Altadena with our initials on it, and inside was a homemade book with printed-out pictures of us and little notes like, "Remember this?" She made it for my 17th birthday. That's gone. |
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