The Slow Burn of Loss
Juliet Sitodi was sitting in class on the morning of January 7th, 2025, when the fire started. At first, she wasn’t too worried. Wildfires weren’t uncommon in Los Angeles. Just a few months earlier, a fire broke out on New Year’s Eve and was contained within a few hours. This one, she assumed, would be the same.
The first sign that something was different came not from the physical presence of a fire but the shifting of energy in the classroom. Students began whispering and speculating, their eyes glued to their phones beneath their desks. Juliet’s mom called and told her to stay at her private school outside the Palisades as she was safer there than at home. However, as the anxiety of her classmates and teachers began to grow, Juliet felt her unease strengthen. Eventually, after some persuading, her mom came to pick her up.
The drive home was the first moment she realized this wasn’t something to overlook. Flames stretched across the hills, as a gray haze infiltrated the sky. Lead concentrations in the air were almost 100 times higher than average. As she looked at the destruction unfolding before her, it didn’t sink in.
Quickly after she arrived home, Juliet’s family evacuated, staying in a hotel in Beverly Hills. When she woke up the next morning, she learned the truth- her home was gone. Everything was gone. “This can’t happen,” she remembers thinking. “We are good people. This isn’t supposed to happen.” Juliet was a normal teenage girl. Her family was kind and loving. She didn’t understand.
The loss came with complicated emotions. At first, she missed her belongings: her clothes, her books, the little things that made up her world. But then came the guilt. Was she being selfish? Other people had nothing to begin with, yet here she was, grieving over material things. She didn’t know how to respond when people came up to her crying, saying how sorry they were. She wasn’t crying. It didn’t feel real.
In fact, it took Juliet two weeks to truly realize the gravity of the situation. School was canceled for a week, but even when she returned, she felt like she was always moving through the metal-tasting, hazy cloud of smoke. She couldn’t focus, couldn’t give her all. But what affected her in ways she never expected was the simple disruption of routine. Her drive to school was different now. She could no longer see the ocean every morning, making her feel extremely displaced and disoriented.
But one day, reality hit her like a truck. Juliet moved out of the hotel and into a temporary home- one that wasn’t really hers. The place where she had grown up, where her friends gathered before football games, where she shared family dinners, was gone. And it was never coming back. She would never feel the sensation of the cold metal bleachers on her legs with her friends by her side again. She would no longer walk into Palisades village to go shopping on a hot summer day.
It wasn’t until friends and family reminded her that she was allowed to grieve, that she was allowed to miss what once was, that she began to truly process it all. Her house wasn’t just a house. It was where everyone gathered, where she felt safe, where she belonged. Losing it made her feel cut off from the world, secluded from the life she once had.
Juliet is still finding her way through the loss, still learning to adjust to a new normal. But she now understands that grief isn’t just about losing a place. It’s about losing a part of yourself. Juliet lost her stability, routine, and identity with her home. And that kind of loss takes time to heal. I want those reading this to realize that grief doesn’t follow a timeline. It’s okay to mourn both the big and small things. Juliet’s ongoing journey proves that healing is more than just moving on; it’s allowing yourself to feel the emotions of your loss.
Juliet Sidoti Juliet’s Home After the Fire Juliet’s Home Before the Fire
