When the 2020 Walbridge Fire forced the evacuation of our remote Sonoma County property, I found myself thrust into a peculiar state of suspended reality. For three weeks, I existed in exile, unable to confirm whether our home still stood or had been reduced to ash. Information was scarce and often contradictory; each day brought wild oscillations between hope and despair.

In this mental fog, I recalled Erwin Schrödinger's 1935 thought experiment, where a cat in a sealed box exists simultaneously as both alive and dead until observation collapses these dual states into one reality. Similarly, our home existed in two parallel states—both preserved exactly as we left it and completely destroyed—until we could return to witness its fate.

These composite images reconstruct that psychological paradox by physically merging photographs of ordinary domestic life with scenes of post-fire destruction. The uncanny juxtapositions—eggs frying in a pan amid the charred ruins of a kitchen, a pristine garden blooming beside scorched earth, a coffee cup perfectly positioned on the remains of a favorite chair—capture the mind's resistance to accepting either outcome completely.

As climate change intensifies wildfire seasons across the West, more people face this particular form of psychological trauma—not just the potential loss of property, but the elongated period of uncertainty where home becomes both present and absent, a quantum state that challenges our fundamental need for security and resolution.