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.

Forever And A Day

It has been hot here in Stamford, New York, which seems rude considering I came here expecting some kind of emotional clarity and not an argument with the weather. The house has been holding the heat in the walls the way old houses hold everything else—with unreasonable devotion and absolutely no interest in modernization.

Mom’s furnace has also been problematic, because apparently even in July, a furnace can still find a way to insert itself into the conversation. I have always believed that household appliances choose their timing based on spite. Refrigerators fail before holidays. Plumbing fails after hardware stores close. Furnaces, with the kind of theatrical timing usually reserved for relatives and badly trained horses, decide to become complicated during a heat wave. Municipal infrastructure is predictable as it always seems to fail at five in the afternoon the day before a federal holiday.

The past few nights have been clear enough that the sky almost looks like Vermont, aside from the streetlights, which keep insisting that I am not in the middle of a field somewhere listening to frogs and coyotes and whatever small creature has decided to exist loudly in the woods.

Stamford has its own version of night, and I have been trying not to compare it too directly to home. That is a losing game. Every place has its own darkness. Vermont has the kind that swallows the edges of things. Stamford has the kind that leaves the streetlights humming, the old houses outlined, and the past standing in the yard with its hands in its pockets.

Today was the day I promised myself that if I did not make the list for my summer camp reunion, I would stop letting the weekend hang in the air like an unanswered question. I would spend it at mom’s house instead. I wrote that promise down because there are certain things a person has to decide long before disappointment arrives, otherwise disappointment will walk right in, sit in the best chair, and begin dictating ones life. I have spent enough of my life waiting for someone else to decide whether I belonged somewhere.

Somewhere along the way I noticed a pattern. The biggest changes in my life almost always arrived with two weeks’ notice. Dad gave me two weeks before we moved. Summer camp came with two weeks’ notice. Boarding school did, too. The changes happened quickly. The healing never did.

Forever and a day is my unit of measurement for 366 consecutive days.

There are people who measure time by calendars, birthdays, school years, fiscal quarters, or the number of winters a roof has survived without leaking. I measure certain things by how long it took my nervous system to stop expecting another life-altering detour. Two weeks became the sound of suitcases being packed. Two weeks became the distance between ordinary life and whatever came next. Two weeks became the amount of time adults apparently believed was sufficient warning before sending a child through another door.

The distance between who we were and who we become is measured in ordinary Tuesdays.

It is strange to come back to Stamford and find that the town has been keeping a place for me. Not the way people say that in a sentimental movie, with music swelling in the background and somebody standing on a porch in a soft knit sweater. I walk into places in and around my hometown and people know me. Half the time someone else pays for my drinks when I am out. Everyone I know in town reads my website, which is insane in a way I am still trying to process.

There is something surreal about having spent years writing into the void only to discover that the void has a barstool, a tab, and a fairly detailed opinion about your latest entry.

People in town know me as Emily—the woman with the biggest heart and the wild eyes of the dancing girls.

That is not a small thing. I know because I have mistaken smaller things for love before. I have mistaken attention for love, proximity for love, nostalgia for love, tradition for love, and relationships that exist only at a specific place and time of year for love.

Summer camp once held that position in my life. It had the advantage of being attached to childhood, and childhood is an unreliable narrator with excellent lighting. For a long time, I thought camp was where the love was. I thought that if I could get back there, if I could be seen there, if I could be remembered there, some missing piece of me might finally stop rattling around loose in the drawer.

Then Stamford did something I did not expect. It remembered me. The nicest thing anyone has ever done for me was remember something I thought the world had forgotten. I wasn’t looking for another home Apparently, one had been waiting for me.

Last night I went to the Bel with Nora. Throughout the evening, as her friend consumed more and more alcohol, she kept touching me with increasing frequency and force. It was no longer subtle social contact, it had become pushing and pulling.

I stated that I had a boundary that due to autism, I prefer to have limited physical contact with people who are not close friends. I said it plainly because there comes a point where politeness is no longer kindness, especially to oneself.

There are people who believe boundaries are accusations. They hear, “please do not touch me like that” and somehow translate it into a criminal indictment of their entire character. This has never made sense to me.

I have very clearly and well-established personal boundaries. A boundary says, “Here is where I end, and here is where you begin.”

I do not owe anyone access to my body because they are drunk, lonely, affectionate, harmless, or unaware of their own hands. I especially do not owe a polite reminder to someone who has already been told twice.

I have had to explain myself too many times to people who were not listening in the first place. Autism is not a debate. Touch is not automatically comfort just because someone else intends it that way. I do not say that to be dramatic. I say it because I have learned the difference between discomfort and danger, and my body has its own filing system for both.

The funny thing is that Stamford, for all its gossip, all its familiarity, all its little-town habit of knowing your business before you have finished having it, has been gentler with me than places that claimed to know me better. People here seem to understand that I am both approachable and not available for handling. They say hello. They buy me a drink. They talk about my writing. They tell me they read the website. They remember my mother, or my family, or the girl I was, or the woman I became while no one was watching the transformation. They do not always know the whole story, but they seem to know enough not to pull at the pages.

I spent part of the afternoon running G scale trains across my parents’ bedroom floor. Such things would have been tolerable to mom, but would have annoyed the fuck out of my late father. This seemed like sufficient justification.

There is a particular pleasure in doing something harmless that would have irritated a dead parent. Not cruel pleasure. Not revenge, exactly. More like a small adjustment of the universe. A rebalancing. A child-sized rebellion finally granted adult supervision by the very person committing it. Dad would have had opinions. Dad always had opinions. The trains would have been in the way. The floor would not have been a railroad. The bedroom would not have been an appropriate place for model railroad operations.

Every freight train eventually disappears around a bend. So does every chapter of a life.

Some memories return because you invite them. Others simply let themselves in. The house is full of both kinds. There are the memories I go looking for, the ones in drawers, boxes, photographs, corners, and old fixtures that have somehow outlived better decisions.

Then there are the memories that find me while I am doing something stupid and practical, like looking for a tool, checking the furnace, or stepping over train track in a bedroom where my parents used to sleep.

Every old photograph contains at least one person who had no idea they were living the good old days.

There is both a cruelty and a kindness in photographs. They preserve a version of us before the verdict came in. Someone is always smiling at the camera without knowing what will happen later. Someone is always standing beside a car, a porch, a Christmas tree, a lake, a birthday cake, a dog, a friend, a parent, a house, or a future ghost. Someone always believes there will be more time. Even when they know better, they believe it anyway, in the name of optimism, because daily life depends on that little act of arrogance. We load the dishwasher, answer messages, make plans, buy milk, repair furnaces, and run trains across bedroom floors as though the entire arrangement is not temporary.

Regret is the subtle reminder that we are still alive.

I do not think regret is always punishment. It proves we cared about the outcome. It proves some part of us is still speaking to the past, even if the past has stopped answering in any language we can use. I regret things I said. More often, I regret things I did not get to say. I regret not understanding sooner that love is not always where I first found it, and belonging is not always attached to the place that taught me the meaning of the word.

I took a break from The Bel long enough to take in the sunset from atop the roof of the abandoned mansion on Academy Street.

There are views that feel stolen, and that was one of them. The roof held the heat of the day, and the town stretched out below with all its familiar contradictions—old houses, new cars, people driving home from work, porch lights starting to come on, trees holding their shapes against the evening. It looked almost peaceful from up there, which is one of the great tricks of distance.

The sky had that clear, open quality it has had for the last few nights, the kind that makes me think of Vermont until a streetlight reminds me where I am. Not disappointed, exactly. Just corrected.

Vermont has darker skies, but Stamford has older ghosts, at least for me. The constellations do not care about county lines, childhood wounds, reunion lists, or whether a person has finally been recognized in her hometown after spending years believing recognition lived somewhere else. The moon does not care either, which is part of her charm.

The moon is far enough away that her light feels ancient, yet close enough to remind us that ancient things still matter.

I stood there thinking about how much of my life has been spent trying to return to something. A place. A feeling. A version of myself before the next two-week notice arrived. I thought summer camp was the place that could give that back to me. Maybe it did, for a while. Maybe it gave me exactly what it could, and I was the one who kept asking it to remain unchanged after everything else in my life had moved around the bend. That is a lot to ask of any place, especially one built on seasons, cabins, songs, schedules, waterfront rules, and children who eventually grow up no matter how strongly everyone objects.

Maybe that is what I needed all along. Not to be chosen by the past. To be recognized by the present. There was a time when not making the inclusionary list would have felt like another kind of exile.

If I do not go, I will be here at mom’s—I will spend the weekend in the place that waited for me without making a spectacle of its patience. I used to think love had to announce itself in order to be real. Stamford simply remembered.