Glitter and Shrapnel: Dancing on a Volcano in 2025
(The Full Story)
A former IVF patient processes “the largest explosion in Southern CA history” in her hometown.
By Yvonna Cázares
Saturday, May 17, 2025 — Palm Springs, CA
[10:42 AM] — I sit in my mother’s SUV, folding sunshades and watching the mountains rise above the gray techo of her home. Tawny hills zigzag with trails, and snow faintly glimmers atop Mount San Jacinto. Hummingbirds whiz by. I hear woodpeckers and spot yellow finches in the palo verde tree. I take in the view with gratitude.
[10:45 AM] — A stab of pain strikes my left abdomen. It’s a reminder of my IVF procedure during the pandemic. After two painful rounds, they retrieved just one egg — my “$18,000 egg.” The past few days have been painful, I don’t know why. My mother enters the car; I am taking her to water the plants at her AirBnb by the airport.
[10:47 AM] — For some reason, I drive us quickly down Palm Canyon instead of Indian Canyon Drive (the parallel downtown street that’s typically less busy). We dance and laugh along to a Gloria Gaynor hit playing on K-GAY, our favorite station. We cross yet another street named after historic tribal elders. Brunch-goers and flag twirlers fill the sidewalks. Palm Springs feels vibrant.
[10:52 AM] –
BOOM.
[10:53 AM] — I can’t feel the brake under my foot. I see smoke in the rearview mirror. People shout. Tourists run. We pull into a lot off Indian Canyon and watch Fire Station 1 respond. My heart races as the black cloud stretches overhead.
Had we just missed it by seconds? Yes.
What if I had gone down Indian, my usual route? Yes.
That moment — the rupture — would unfold into something much bigger.
[11:45 AM] — We arrive back at my mom’s house. She hugs my stepdad. I say frantically, “We missed it by less than a minute!”
Shaken, I sit down and hold my mom’s Maltese–Bichon Frise puppy.
I say her name, “BonBon!” with my usual coos and she licks my tears.
My abdomen aches sharply, but I feel a deeper pain in my chest, an unease about something else ticking beneath the surface. As videos went viral and the media combed for motives, I kept revisiting what I knew from my public service career: I coordinated emergency operations, managed disaster service workers, led trauma responses, supported fire victims, and processed protests and civil unrest.
The news soon confirmed what we feared: an explosion, possibly intentional. One fatality, four injuries. The blast occurred across the street from the Desert Regional Medical Center.
Not an abortion clinic, but a fertility clinic.
The kind that stores eggs like mine.
I’d been planning to move my egg from Northern CA to ARC because my annual storage fees had jumped from $200 to $950, per Spring’s email to me last week.
What if I’d lost the one tangible hope I’d frozen into existence?
Sunday, May 18, 2025 (the next day)
The Mayor Pro-Tempe’s words are strong, inspiring, and inclusive; the press conference focuses on “appropriate language” regarding IVF and human tissues.
The former city worker in me notices that the military town of the City of Twenty-Nine Palms (where the young man who died was from) is absent. I say to the TV, “I would have brought them in.”
Sensing my PTSD from my former city role in crisis communications my mom says, “Omg, Yvonna. You’re not in Oakland anymore.”
My parents had let me stay the night in their office after urging me to rest and take what the “kids” might call a depression nap.
I know touristy Palm Springs will always be teeming with life, but most people think of the high desert as a long, lonely road to Vegas. The arid beauty has long drawn many to Joshua Tree. Artists and workers still travel between our valleys. Recalling fond memories of camping with my family and welcoming military coming home, I say, “People call it another world out there, but we’re one desert. The pain echoes across valley lines.”
I kept thinking: What about him?
I refused to flatten him into a monster.
Wasn’t he once reachable? Aren’t others still?
Zooming Out: A Pattern, Not a Moment
There’s an epidemic among young men that seems to be briefly acknowledged when one of these episodes happens. A call to action about how this isn’t just about one man, but a system breakdown. In my browser, I pull together suicide rates among youth (especially young men) which are climbing. In cities like Palm Springs and Twentynine Palms, mental health resources remain severely underfunded.
In my own life, I knew what it meant to feel alone. Longing to matter, to feel my own worth. And I learned how to ride the lightning or capture it in a bottle.
I understand the urge to bring down power, to break down walls, to erupt something, especially when the world feels unjust, so its foundations can finally be seen. As a former community organizer, I used to invite people who felt shut out or shut down by institutions to speak at city meetings. Later as a public servant, I’d invite them into my office.
I think to myself, it’s not just suicidality. It’s the confluence of accessible weapons, irresponsible leaders supplying repetitive extremism, and irresponsible, addiction-driving social media algorithms that radicalize more than they connect.
Whether these views are left or right leaning, I’m less concerned with the views themselves and more with how easily they can lead to harm. The former youth organizer in me wishes I could’ve told him he didn’t need to wage war on himself or others, and that he could be someone like me “who fights without fists and no sound.”
And then I remembered a moment from Berlin in 2023, on a bike tour led by a lesbian professor. I hadn’t gone to Berlin for trauma tourism. I went for deep house and techno music, modern reflective architecture, and to honor my late travel-loving grandmother.
History followed me.
We stopped in front of buildings once targeted by lone actors during the Weimar Republic. Men who acted out of disillusionment and found ideology in their despair. They assassinated leaders, fueled by extremist lies, before the Nazis even rose to power.
In my mind I saved these moments like a jpg file in a folder pathway: Economic despair → Personal grievance → Ideological justification → Lone violence → Group validation → Political normalization.
The funneling of disillusionment into violence is a cycle. The clash between classes and generations, the hopelessness just beneath the surface (this is not new).
Holding Space for Rage and Grace
As a writer and creative, I find meaning everywhere and have long believed multiple truths can be held at once. I try to understand how a person reaches that place, not to excuse it, but to remind myself how fragile hope can be. If sensitive materials had been damaged, I might have felt more anger, sadness, and distrust, especially knowing how expensive it is to keep my egg stored far away up north and realizing that no center storing my future is truly safe.
Having breathed in his dust and watched it carry across the desert sky, I worry about my egg in NorCal and fear copycats.
I think: if we don’t help these young men, what so-called “evil” forces will?
They’ll act quickly if we fail to see Guy as any guy, as human.
The volcanoes we fear aren’t on the horizon. We’re standing on them now.
From Isla Vista to Buffalo to Palm Springs and just yesterday in D.C., these acts reveal a shared digital ecosystem of radicalization that urgently needs deeper scrutiny. They want to matter, even through destruction.
A Hike, a Talk, a Pattern
My mom and I take a walk.
I tell her: “It’s not just about one man,” I say. “It’s about a world where more and more men like him are slipping through the cracks.”
She nods. She listens.
Someone once told me, “I didn’t ask to be born.”
And I nodded.
Because I knew that feeling.
And then I thought:
What if we had seen Guy the day before detonation? What would I say to him?
Each step I take plays a point or action in my conversation with Guy: Check in. Listen. Empathize. Connect. Get curious. Share. Follow up.
Then again — doubt.
Am I coddling here?
Am I the wrong messenger? Or just a soap slogan?
Like him, am I focused on the wrong target?
I feel worse.
My mother says, “The fact is, that not just one person heard this. The whole town did.”
I tell her I think the sound ricocheted off the mountains and canyon walls. The very mountains that protect us also stripped us of our security blankets. Or I should say, our swimming pool towels.
She laughs, then says seriously, “imagine hearing this all the time like people who live in war zones?”
I nod and reply, “Yes we’re nowhere near that.”
But something made me think again.
I tell her that as a child, seeing missiles over Kuwait on TV made me believe war was something we just did every summer, and I’d pray every night against it.
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Even now, I never want that to feel normal, no matter where it’s happening: abroad, at home, or inside.
Community Pulse: A Rooftop, a Dance Floor, a Smile
Later I’m at a rooftop bar with my parents. We meet a woman with tattoos and a Fendi purse who jokes we thought she was the Unabomber after leaving her bag unattended over 20 minutes.
She laughs, and so do we.
As a DJ plays throwbacks, I see a group of mostly Filipino friends and families sitting nearby. I’m reminded of my childhood Palm Springs neighborhood which has since changed, but where Filipino, Latin, and veteran families raised us side by side.
Enjoying the familiarity of diversity and family, in that moment, I am calm and grateful again.
I pull the woman onto the dance floor.
My mom (usually the first to get a restaurant moving) joins us.
We rope in others. We sway. We laugh. We remember we’re alive.
Emotional Recalibration
It’s Monday night.
I’m in the shower, my safe place to cry. I am worried about being asked questions from my MBA classmates about what happened over the weekend. I breathe in mint tea shampoo.
As I get dressed, I think about how scattered I feel. Like the tiny black circles on my cream blouse (dispersed widely, but still a part of a beautiful whole) I see a repeating pattern. As I recognize it, I also realize the dots are connected.
What if we all reached out, shared our doubts and truths, holding space for them and ourselves?
For joy. For rage. For grief. For the lost.
And then a classmate does just that for me by phone.
This Land Is Our Land
A few days later, I attend my nephew’s kindergarten recital.
They sing “This Land is Your Land.”
I tear up.
Afterward, over pizza, a little Black girl next to us tells me she got punched in the face by a classmate. Her brother adds that he got pushed and told to hush up. I kneel down.
“I’m so sorry that happened to you. You didn’t deserve that.
Maybe he was angry — not at you, but maybe himself, or his family. Are you okay?”
They nod. Their mother smiles, surprised.
I turn to my mom later and say, “People just open up to me. I swear I don’t ask for these stories.”
She says, “They’re just kids.”
But I’m not sure. Whatever it is — this ability to hear, to hold, this opening for trust and light — I don’t want to be the only one experiencing it.
Their honesty was a mirror. And listening is sometimes the most powerful thing we can do. The consultant in me (or maybe the educator) wonders: Can’t we all learn to yield this power? To care. To listen. To serve?
That night, I glance at an email from Osaka Metropolitan University (a global PR contract opportunity). I think: I have more work to do here. At home. And mark it unread.
Dinner at Saffron
Today we celebrate my stepdad’s 70th birthday at Saffron, a new Persian restaurant and lounge we’ve been meaning to try. It’s been closed since Saturday’s explosion, and being within one block from American Reproductive Center, we decided to support it.
For a moment, I dwell on the definition of reproduction: “the sexual or asexual process by which organisms generate new individuals of the same kind,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary.
I fix my hair in the bathroom. Still adjusting from Bay fog to desert heat, I look in the mirror, tears welling up despite the celebration. I recall last night’s dream: I’m holding my late grandmother’s hand before a destroyed building. She taught me an expansive love ideology. I whisper, “May the Lord bless you and keep you” — Numbers 6:24–26.
Back at the table, my stepdad jokes that when he thought my mom had perished, he started browsing SilverSingles. We giggle, and I debate whether pistachio ice cream or the subtle honey of baklava might ease the ache in my fallopian tubes. What if what I’m feeling is more than memory or longing? Perhaps it’s a warning? A reminder?
We need to care for and heal ourselves and each other now — so that one day I (and we all) can bring someone into this world safely, and so those already here can learn to find peace and stay alive in it.
Memorial Day
My MBA class has been rescheduled for the next day and government clients of mine have their offices closed for the holiday. The local news reports of carnations being dropped near midday from an airplane to honor the fallen as well as how loved ones want us to remember George Floyd. I’ve shared my reflection on the bombing with a classmate and as I’m hiking I receive his response. I skim through his replies in italics.
About me not being close to a war zone…
Are we? Like…..really? how far are we from that. The economy is in a free fall, the unemployment rate is a conclusive indicator of desperation of the people, which is a direct correlation to death. Actions of desperate people often lead to death. We live in a technological world where war is nearly invisible because many are so desensitized to death… there are people in this very country who inhabit active war zones in multiple cities throughout the US, that are not given the same press and attention as palm springs. (also, check out the Tulsa Bombings of black wall street)
He wanted me to go deeper into the part about seeing war on tv as a kid, since we both came of age seeing friends join ROTC, get sent to Afghanistan, never to return.
On the woman with the Fendi purse…
Elaborate on the fear that we have as a country… She had tattoos, did this make her menacing? What if she had worn a hijab, would the reaction be the same? Are we being vigilant, or are we in a state of realistic paranoia? I doubt anybody is blowing up a Fendi Bag lol.
On the story of the children at the pizza place…
I’ve got a 4-year-old nephew who runs up to people and tells them he’s on Paw Patrol, so kids just be saying anything. Also, I probably would have asked the little girl “why she got hit?” and to also “Hit back!”
Then at the end, he shares –
Is this about you, or everybody? People may not be concerned about safety but just getting ahead… I mean look how we treat the planet. Also, you must be more direct about the importance of leaving a legacy. My take is that your reality was rocked by a catastrophic incident that did not harm you in any way.
I had a friend who came back from special forces and had to check himself into a mental hospital every 4th of July because he just could not take the sounds of explosions. He killed himself in his garage with the car on.
This incident did not cause the amount of fear that would prevent you from going to a crowded roof top bar that very night, or out to dinner in an area near the blast zone.
His questions were valid. He wanted me to attack the story from all angles. I sent him my appreciation via text and shared that I also process in real time — and differently. He caught my doubts and noticed my privilege.
But one word hit hardest: legacy.
This is a man close to Guy’s age. A painter. A hobbyist gun collector. An accountant for his family’s military cemetery. He sees tombstones on his way to work. I think: he’s reminded of muerte daily.
So what if this had been my last piece of writing? What would I leave behind? What example would I have shown?
What if the bomb had torn through me or my mother and placed our limbs beside Guy’s torso across Palm Canyon Drive? What if we’d been hospitalized?
I can’t bear the thought of losing my mother. During her cancer scare, I surprised myself while whispering angrily to God: How dare you.
I’ve always been a do-not-resuscitate person. A “please-cremate-me cheaply” joke at family dinners. My pension and savings are already earmarked for my family.
I’d want to be remembered as caring, imaginative, earnest. Maybe funny. Someone who loved deeply. A person of faith and conviction. Different. Unique. Proud.
But if my egg had been destroyed?
I would’ve whispered again, anguished: How could you.
Another blow to hope.
Like a bird laying piece by piece to build a strong nest, I would’ve been devastated.
How do you begin again, knowing nowhere is safe? How could I afford another attempt?
The financial loss would pale in comparison to the heartbreak.
And yet, birds rebuild.
I’ve long known life isn’t fair.
I was almost a stepmom once. I can foster. I can adopt. I might still become a parent. No path is easy.
This experience is what healing in public and in community can look like.
Somehow, the blast gave me more reasons to live, even in an uncertain world. My embryo (and others) survived. That means more purpose.
More reasons to succeed. To protect not just the ones I love now, but the ones I hope to meet.
I’m still here. And my future is still unfolding. And bright.
Author’s Note: Deep thanks to my mom, stepdad, and dad; and especially to Carlisle, Charles, Biko, and Kian, my “beta readers with alpha voices,” as they helped me hold this story with care.
Yvonna Cázares is a writer, civic leader, and public engagement strategist. She leads two ventures: Viridian Management Group and Helios Media Group. Her thoughts are her own and don’t represent her clients nor organizations she works with in a personal or professional capacity.
Yvonna uses Medium as a container for intellectual and creative freedom where she shares mostly short essays and creative fiction. For less playful works, including policy guides and reports from Yvonna, please visit her firm’s Insights page at viridianmg.com.
