Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
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The stereo’s spinning again. Not a Bluetooth speaker, not some cold digital stream humming through soulless plastic—but an actual stereo. The kind with physical buttons you can punch down like you’re dialing into a memory. Indigo Girls – 1200 Curfews. Track 12. Closer to Fine. A CD I’ve owned since it came out, and one…
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Lately, my mother has been calling me to talk about death. Not in the abstract or philosophical sense—she isn’t suddenly overcome with introspection. No, for her, dying is a task list, a ledger of unfinished business that she’s decided I need to complete on her behalf. The way she tells it, I’m some unfinished project…
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Some of the most significant moments in life slip in quietly, like soft footsteps on a worn-out wooden floor — so subtle you hardly notice until they have already rewritten everything you thought you knew. Our story started, as most modern stories do, with a reply on Twitter. Amelia had posted a #WritersLift—an open call…
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There are places in this world that never quite let you go, no matter how many years pass, no matter how far your life carries you away. For me, that place has always been Stamford, New York—the small town where I grew up, where this chapter of my story began sometime in 1987, long before…
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This morning, I keep thinking about the storm I carry inside me—how it’s always been there, humming just beneath the surface, daring the world to notice. It is not new. It didn’t just arrive one day. It was born with me, braided into my breath, threaded into every bone. Some days, I wonder if people…
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Mom, You are wrong. You are wrong about who I am, you are wrong about what happened, and you are wrong about the story you keep telling yourself to avoid facing it. There was no “sex change.” There was no “transition.” There was only a girl—me—born as your daughter, living as your daughter, needing routine…
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Some nights I sit with the silence and feel like I’m eavesdropping on my own past. The 1990s were the best decade of my life, and I don’t say that with any polished nostalgia or rose-tinted yearning for mixtapes, AOL Chatrooms, and pagers. I say it because I was still half-feral then—caught somewhere between a…
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Some names are given at birth—chosen in hospitals, whispered in delivery rooms, penned on certificates by people who may or may not have any real idea who we are yet. Others are earned through fire, dirt, resilience, and reputation. Still others are worn like armor, or masks, or sometimes both, depending on the day. The…
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This past weekend, I drove back to the place where my story began. The road to my mother’s house is the same as it’s always been. That drive always stirs something in me. A reminder of who I was before the world turned hard and unforgiving. I didn’t just go to see my mom. I…
Emily Pratt Slatin
P.O. Box 1231
Middletown Springs, VT 05757-1231
United States Of America