Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
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I disappeared. Not in the tidy, storybook way people want to believe—no heartfelt goodbye, no neat conclusion, no time for anyone to brace themselves. I vanished in the rawest sense. One morning I stood up, walked out, and never came back. No explanations. No apologies. Just a chair left empty and the sound of me…
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There are days when the silence swallows me whole, and it is not the kind of silence I once cherished—the silence of a cold Vermont night where even the pines seem to breathe in rhythm with me. This is the kind of silence that drips bitterness on the tongue, like chewing aspirin dry. It tastes…
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Some people are raised by fathers. I was handled like a problem to be solved, a miscalculation to be corrected. It wasn’t parenting; it was a slow, relentless campaign. I was born on July 20, 1979, in New York City. My father, Harvey L. Slatin, was sixty-four years old, with a worldview weathered in the…
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It’s 11:48 p.m., and I’m lying on a mattress that used to belong to someone else, in a room that isn’t mine anymore, in a house I never thought I’d walk back into with an open heart. But here I am. Forty-six years old, purse on the dresser, boots by the door, and the familiar…
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It rained today on my 46th birthday. Not a long, cinematic storm—no thunder, no sky-wide crescendo, no poetic deluge to make it mean something larger. Just one of those sudden summer stutters that slips through the valley like it remembered something it meant to say, then lost interest halfway through. The air shifted like it…
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Whenever I think of the early 1990s, it hits me like a half-remembered melody from a mixtape someone made just for me—the kind you played until the tape wore thin, because it was the only thing that ever made you feel understood. That time wasn’t just a backdrop. It was a frequency I lived on. Everything felt…
Emily Pratt Slatin
P.O. Box 1231
Middletown Springs, VT 05757-1231
United States Of America