EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

An Outsider At The Door

May 12, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

The photograph is from 1989. I am leaning over the railing at 78 Main Street in Stamford, New York, wearing a jumpsuit with small white stars on it, with the old patterned wallpaper behind me. I do not remember the day it was taken. I remember the house. I remember the feeling of being watched, and watching back. There is a difference.

I look at that picture now and see a child who had already learned something she should not have needed to learn so early. Not fear exactly. Not sadness either. More like awareness. The kind that settles in before language catches up.

Writers often begin as children who learned early that watching mattered. I learned that at an early age.

It does not matter where you go, or where you have been. People remember who you are as a person. Not always correctly. Not always kindly. But they remember the shape of you, or the version they were able to understand. Given enough time, distance, and shared life experience, the pattern becomes visible. People remember what they were capable of seeing.

All but a small handful of relationships in my life have existed in the same category: me standing outside the door. Present, close enough to hear the room, and still not inside it. I learned to hide between the lines of whatever I was writing before I understood that writing was not a hobby. It was a record.

Friendship, for me, was never casual. I usually had one person at a time. When that person left, it felt like my world being torn apart. Closure is rarely neat. Most endings do not announce themselves. They arrive as absence. A phone call that never comes. A message that stays unanswered. A person who used to know the details of your life becoming someone who would need context before the story could even begin.

And then there exists the other category of friendship. The friends who truly see you for who you really are, on every level. Matt. Penfold. Amelia. Maddie. Those friendships ring like a bell in the night whenever I feel unbound and alone in this world. The people who did never waffled.

Mom did not make the list. That is not cruelty. It is classification. Mom loved me. I know that. She kept things my father would have destroyed. She saved photographs, patches from work, and pieces of a girlhood other people tried to distort into something else. She saw me in the subtle ways that mattered. She also compromised in ways that mattered. Nothing mattered more to mom than my happiness.

With mom it was never a question of affection. It was about who stayed consistent when consistency cost them something.

The child in the photograph did not know any of this yet. She only knew the railing, the wallpaper, the house, the adults, the rules, the rooms she was allowed to enter, and the ones she had to read from the doorway. She did not know she would become a writer. She did not know she was already becoming one.

She was just watching. And I have spent the rest of my life writing down what she saw.