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.

Ceramic Plates And Other Signs Of Permanence

May 24, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

Today is my anniversary with Amelia. We married on May 24, 2021. Five years sounds tidy on paper. It sounds like something I should be able to hold in my hand, label, understand, and explain. But the truth is that my relationship with Amelia changed my life so profoundly that I am still, even now, trying to comprehend the full extent of it. She did not simply enter my life. She altered the entire trajectory of it.

Before Amelia, I had only dated cisgender women, women who, like me, were assigned female at birth. Amelia was the first transgender person I had ever been with.

I think people sometimes imagine that a relationship changes you through grand gestures, dramatic moments, or some cinematic turning point. For me, Amelia changed me in quieter, more permanent ways. Most of all, she changed the way I understood the difference between surviving and actually living.

She changed the way I saw myself, too, because being loved by someone who had fought so hard to be herself made it harder for me to keep abandoning parts of myself.

When Amelia met me, I was an absolute mess.

There is no graceful way to phrase that. I was post-job, post-everything, and still operating with the same intensity I had carried for years. Civilian life felt alien to me for quite a while. Calm did not feel like peace. Quiet did not feel like safety. Stillness felt suspicious, as though something awful was simply taking its time getting to me.

And then there was Amelia.

She met me in that condition and somehow she stayed. Not because I was easy. Not because I had everything figured out. She saw the mess, but she also saw me. I think that distinction saved me in ways I am still learning how to name.

There is something almost impossible about being loved while you are still trying to find your way back to yourself. That is one of the things I love most about her. Amelia has never been merely an idea of love. She is the daily, ordinary, stubborn reality of it. She is the woman who has stood in the actual life with me, not the curated one. She is the woman who has seen me sharp, afraid, exhausted, funny, tender, angry, brilliant, impossible, loyal, wounded, and still surviving. And somehow, through all of that, she has loved me.

I think about 2020 sometimes, and the way everything happened all at once. When I walked out, there were losses I could not fully understand in the moment. Angie and I later got back into contact, and for a while, it seemed as though a friendship might still be possible. I wanted to believe that some relationships could evolve without vanishing entirely.

Maybe some can. But in the end, Angie and I went our separate ways. Her family became distant, too, and none of them have spoken to me much in recent years. That absence is its own kind of grief, even when it is quiet. Even when life has moved on. Even when I know I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

Today is about Amelia. Today is about the woman I married on May 24, 2021. Today is about the fact that, somehow, through every impossible turn, every unanswered question, every wound I carried, and every version of myself I had to survive before becoming this one, I found her. Or she found me. Maybe both.

Amelia and I have never celebrated holidays or relationship milestones through grand gestures, gifts, flowers, or cards. Neither of us has ever cared much about those things. Instead, we give each other the one thing you can never get back—our time together. I think that has always meant more to both of us than anything expensive or elaborate ever could.

This year, Amelia and I decided it was finally time to replace the cheap plates we bought from Amazon when we first bought the farm back in 2020. For years, they were simply the plates we had, practical and forgettable in the way survival purchases usually are. Today we replaced them with colorful ceramic plates like the ones you would find at a Mexican restaurant. Heavy, bright, imperfect, full of color. Honestly, it felt strangely symbolic without either of us intending it to. Five years later, our life together no longer feels temporary. Neither do we.