1/10/2025: Everything That Was and Everything That's Gone (part 1)

Really, I wasn't planning on writing too much about myself, just throwing my thoughts out once in a while and writing stories on the rest of the site, and this logbook section as a little bit of "behind-the-scenes" rambling when I don't have someone to tell about whatever nonsense is going through my head, but I suppose the rather pretentious idea behind that is going to the wind (or rather, the fire) now.

My house and the entire surrounding neighborhood burned to the ground at around noon Wednesday. I found out at I think 1:36 p.m.; there had been no news for the long hours up until that point and I started scraping through any social media posts on the subject out of just the chance there'd be information at all. Anything at all about the place I grew up in and the place I loved, to the me almost 350 miles away. I found a photo of our street corner, flames distantly pouring out of the windows in the blur of the car's movement of the image. I had already cried hard in the morning finding out that the fire had spread all directions around our address. But there was nothing about our's in particular, so I held hope for the following hours until there was no more hope to be had, only the unfortunate truth. I cried harder.

In the past couple days I have inevitably been thinking about that house a lot. I was afraid for it when I still thought it was standing, but truthfully, I'm even more afraid that one day the memories of what was there and what I thought of it all will fade and blur into nothingness as time passes on, the things I enjoyed and the things I am sure have ruined me to this day and the things I loved so dearly that I didn't dare to say how much I did because I thought it will all be there forever, that one day years upon years in the future if I last until I am old and grey I would return to that house and look dearly upon the generations of things that filled it from top to bottom, the objects I tripped on in the hallways every day because we never dared to get rid of anything. I listen to my father talk about his childhood sometimes, and occasionally when he struggles to recall a name or a detail in a story I can see his frustration and feel the pain of it escaping him; I am terrified that I will be in that place, wanting so desperately to remember and failing. I am someone that likes keeping things. I am someone that feels sick to my stomach even thinking of willingly parting with most of the things I have, and now, after years of contemplating the vague horror of if I were ever forced to, I have been left with no choice at all in the matter. I wasn't there to see what stayed and what went, what escaped the flames and what has now turned into a fine ash and blown far, far, away. So instead, if I have ever dared at all to call myself a "curator" and archivist, I will record these memories while they are still fresh in my mind so that one day I might return to the mind of the me that lives another day today.

Firstly, as I am writing this (at approximately 4 p.m. PST), I have no concrete knowledge as to what has survived amongst the ashes and what is intact; I have only a vague idea based on a extremely select amount of photos sent to me, as there is still no access to the area, not that I would be able to see for myself from this distance. So, I may find in the coming days that some of the objects of my lamentation are quite alright after all, or at least that is my hope. But at the same time, there is much that I am already certain is gone.

Because it is the place I spent the most time in and the one I am most familiar with the contents of, I would like to begin with the contents of my bedroom. It was at the far end of the hallway on the upper floor, neighbored by a bathroom and the master bedroom. The door to the room, which I am unsure of the exact types of wood, but could have perhaps been a cherry wood of somewhat light color, a more orange-toned hue, did not fit the frame perfectly, so it had to be pushed hard on to close with a rather loud sound as the latch finally slotted into its place, otherwise it would drift back open. There was no lock; around the time I attempted for just a moment to run away from home, I had no way to prevent intrusion apart from piling furniture and other things up against the door so that it would not open. When I was young, there was a large white piece of stiff paper, about 2 feet wide by 3 feet tall, that was taped to the back of the door; it was covered in name tags from a church we briefly went to, scribbles, and mostly stickers, which were used as part of some reward system by my mother; these rewards were typically visits to the Natural History Museum. As part of the minimal redocorating I did when I was much older, the paper was removed and shoved in a corner of the closet on the northwest side of the room, behind a bookshelf inside the closet. The closet spanned that entire wall, with three mirrored sliding doors, two on the track behind, one on the track in front. The frame was white, and there were cracks in the bottom corner of one of the doors that someone had broken when they stayed in the room for a short time before I was born. Entering the room faced a small wall, maybe four or five feet wide, which had a frameless hanging mirror on it, so you had to take a slight left turn to really enter. The wall to the right for a long time had a Hamtaro poster on it which featured every character in their base and their profiles, another thing that was removed and moved into the closet with the white paper on the door.

The floor was hardwood, maybe also cherry. It had started to squeak near the southwest corner of the bed. The bedframe was a dark colored wood and was inherited from my great-aunt, over a hundred years old; there was no underframe and it simply framed two mattresses stacked on top of each other so it wasn't too tall. There were some scratched and chunks kind of taken out of it on that southwest corner; I don't know the exact cause, but I may have run into it with the office chair I sat in at the desk opposite of it a few too many times. The walls were painted what I will call a sort of dark olive green; my mother didn't like the color because she thought it was too dull for a child's room, and we had contemplated briefly painting it a lighter color, but we never did. It was all painted by my father, so the paint job towards the white ceiling was a little uneven as I don't think he bothered taping the corners. There were glow in the dark stars on the ceiling (the second time, supposedly; I don't remember the first set as I was too young, but my mother insisted putting up more when I was in maybe late elementary or middle school. I thought there were a bit too many and thus a bit too bright, though. The moon of the set was towards the northeast side of the room.) and a dark brown wood ceiling fan, which contained the main lightbulb in the room under a glass cover; the fan was rarely turned on because it usually didn't get as hot in that room (nothing the air conditioning couldn't solve) and also because it was usually too dusty, so it probably would worsen the light perpetual stuffy nose I had for a while. I had noticed that the room got dustier much faster than other rooms in the house, and I think it was coming out of the vent above the desk on the south side of the room. I didn't think there was anything I could do about it, though, so I just lived with the layer of dust and occasionally tried to clean it, only for everything to be just about as dusty a week later.

The bookshelf in the closet was white and made out of some kind of engineered wood. Before the room downstairs was cleared out, it sat between the door to the narrow kitchen and the door to the bathroom. For a long time, a large square stereo sat on top of the shelf with two speakers; it had a rotating CD player (I believe it held three or four CDs at a time), a casette player, and used a remote to operate as well as buttons on its front face; I do not know if it had AM or FM radio capabilities as we never used it for that. Some of the CDs we played in it were still on the shelf, like lullabies when I was a child. The stereo was moved into the living room not too long ago, maybe in the past year, as I had unplugged it for a long time since it was randomly turning on in the night and playing things for reason I didn't know, and I wasn't too happy with being woken up by the sound of the CD rotater activating. I do not fully recall every book that was on the shelf, but in a quick list for what I can think of, there were: picture books from my childhood ("Hop on Pop", "Goodnight Moon", "Guess How Much I Love You", and many more I don't know the titles of anymore as I certainly have not read them in many years), a large hardcover of Beatrix Potter's complete works (my second copy of something like it, as my mother had given away my first copy to a customer's child without consulting me and before she knew how much I hated to lose anything like that), a popup book on human anatomy (I had taken it to class show-and-tell in first grade and other children had damaged and tore many of the pages and features in it), a book on at-home remedies, many books I got for free from my mother's friend's sister's niece (Wizard of Oz books, which I did not read; Wicked, which I had attempted to read and stopped as I was very young and was scared once I hit the word "fuck," though from what I hear of the rest of that book's contents maybe it's good that I did at the time; several books by an author named Caroline Carlson, "Inkheart" [unsure if I had the others or if I had borrowed them to finish reading the series; inclined to say I owned at least one more], and a variety of others I do not remember the titles of as they weren't particularly memorable), The Phantom Tollbooth (a gift from my uncle, I remember he had presented it to me rather obnoxiously the one time I remember being in his house before it was sold), "The Mysterious Benedict Society" (I believe only the first, the rest were borrowed from the library), "The Far Side Gallery 2", a volumized book of Calvin and Hobbes (probably the first volume), at least 3 older Nat Geo Almanac books (from one of those Scholastic school events, also "El Deafo" and some kind of hardover LEGO book that had something about a submarine build and may have come with an old-fashioned diver minifigure?), Pokemon manga "Rise of Darkrai (1)" and "Adventures: Heartgold & Soulsilver (1)", and god, so many more that I can vaguely picture but not the details of. There was also a small, square red box wrapped with somewhat iridescent "something" that had a drawing of a fox squirrel stuck to it, made by my grandmother before her passing many years ago. Also in that vicinity in the closet was a stereotypical picnic basket, which was much older but I remember particularly for being used as a prop in second grade in the elementary school talent show; it was full of all kinds of junk for a long time, but at one point was emptied out and the contents were sorted into the 7 liter plastic boxes and other containers that I stacked in that corner of the room.

Outside of that closet in the corner was another bookshelf, newer than the other. While the white bookshelf was rather boxy, just the boards attached squarely, the outer bookshelf had a grey frame with open sides and wood (probably also engineered wood) platforms. Like the white one, it had three levels, the lowest level being the tallest. The books on this shelf were ones I had more recently read or simply liked better. Again, a list of what I recall: "Warriors Super Edition: Tigerheart's Shadow" and possibly "Hawkwing's Journey;" a variety of Brandon Mull books and some of the "The Unwanteds" series, mostly bought used in the used store near the family shop that unfortunately closed recently; Princeton Field Guides "Carnivores of the World" purchased in the bookstore in the next town over before they were forced to move; two copies of the Iliad, one combined with the Odyssey (the Robert Fagles translation, needed for a highschool class, and the one published by Fall River Press); Martha Beckwith's "Hawaiian Mythology" purchased on the Big Island in Hawaii in a museum; Nat Geo "Field Guide To The Birds of North America" purchased in what might've been a Pennsylvania state park during a school trip; many school required reads I never sorted, such as "The Stranger"; all of my sketchbooks from when I first started drawing seriously in late elementary school until now, and so a lot of the first drafts of things I intended to write about on this site as well as the characters and stories that shaped much of my early days of this; the notebooks with some of the first writing I did, I think Warrior cats fancharacters, a character called Acornfall, written by hand on lined paper; a Pixar Cars bookend with Lightning McQueen, a rather sturdy and high quality one; a couple years of National Geographic magazines before we forgot to renew the subscription; a bunch of the last Mad Magazines that were sent out with original content, not whatever rehashes they do now; boxes of baseball cards from around 1977-1979 and 2017-2019 in a dusty blue colored plastic box that latched closed; a colorful light blue and red shoebox with calligraphy tools from when my mother still thought she might teach me Chinese; a binder of Pokemon Cards, black colored with a drawing of Oshawott on white paper in the front cover, drawn by the older sister of the family that worked next door to the shop, copied off of some card art, she had given me tons of card when I was really young including base set cards printed around 2001 out of the goodness of her heart; another red box with a sort of velvety texture that also latched closed, also full of Pokemon items like figurines and other toys and Magic the Gathering cards from when I briefly was interested in that. On the top of the shelf was a plushie of my very first "fursona" in elementary school made by one of my best friends as a surprise gift and a snake I made in first grade out of an old tie with googly eyes; it had a ton of tears in it that I had hoped to fix but never did. There was also a small mouse figurine made of rabbit fur in West Germany dressed as a pilot holding a propeller and an air-dry clay figure of a sea-slug character I made in middle school, but its head had broken off and was never fixed. A small jewelry-box drawer painted like a multi-story house with ivy growing on it sat mostly empty, as the interior smelled slightly odd to me and it didn't have much storage space anyways.

It is now 6 p.m. and I have places I need to be, as much as I don't want to, so I will continue sometime later.