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.

I Was Emily Everywhere Else

April 17, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

I said yes before anyone thought to ask, and that realization has been sitting with me longer than the email itself, longer than the idea of a reunion, longer than whatever version of that place still exists in other people's memory. It didn't feel like a decision in the present tense. It felt like something already settled somewhere earlier, something that had been waiting quietly for the condition to appear so it could confirm what had already been decided.

The email came later, plain subject line, no ceremony—Reunion—and I let it sit the way I let most things sit now. Urgency is rarely what it claims to be. The words don't change if you wait. Only your position relative to them does. I knew what it was without opening it. Summer camp has always existed in that hybrid category for me—a place, not exactly a memory, more of a contained social system that still runs somewhere in parallel with everything else.

When I think about that place, I don't think about activities or friendships or anything that would translate easily into conversation. I think about structure. Cabins, schedules, expectations, the quiet repetition of a name that didn't belong to me but was used often enough that it became the operational truth inside that environment.

I was there under a name that wasn't mine. Not symbolically, not as some metaphor I can reframe into something easier to carry or explain. It was written, recorded, spoken, enforced in the same quiet administrative way everything else was enforced. Outside of summer camp, I was known as Emily. That was never a question. It was never something I arrived at or negotiated internally. It was simply accurate. Camp was the variable, not me. That distinction mattered even then, though I didn't yet have the language for it.

I didn't argue with it. That's the part people tend to misunderstand when they look backward and try to apply adult logic to a child's environment. Argument wasn't the function. Endurance was. You learn early which systems allow correction and which ones require you to move through them without altering your own internal structure.

Camp was something to be moved through. As a camper, they were some of the best summers of my life, and it was also consistency under incorrect conditions. Everything worked. Everything ran smoothly. Nothing matched socially for me. I adjusted in the only way that was available to me at the time—I remained intact internally and let the rest operate around me without interference. That skill has followed me into every system since.

A year later, everything changed, though not in the way people like to describe change. When I was fifteen years old and had spent the summer at my parents house, I finally told them I was bisexual because it approximated something I understood but could not yet state precisely. A year later, at sixteen, doctors finally informed me that I was intersex, and I removed the approximation. Lesbian. There wasn't a moment attached to that. No realization, no event, no narrative turning point that makes for a clean story later. Just a correction. Language aligning with something that had been stable long before I had the words to hold it properly.

My father responded in the way he always did when something fell outside his model—he removed it. In this case, he removed me from the house. There was no escalation. No drawn-out conflict. Just an outcome. He told me to grab my things. I left in my car. That part remains one of the cleanest lines in my life. Not easy. Not soft. Just clear.

What followed didn't organize itself as neatly. I ended up back at the same camp under different conditions, not as a camper but as labor. Kitchen work. Dishes. Pots and pans. Heat. Repetition. The kind of work that does not require identity as long as output remains consistent.

It was the first time I occupied that space without the imposed structure that had defined it previously. It wasn't freedom in the way people tend to describe it. It was the absence of interference, which functioned more accurately. I remember going down to the lake early one morning before anyone else was awake, sitting on the dock while the water still held a flat, undisturbed surface. I looked at my own reflection long enough to confirm something I already knew—still there, still Emily, only here I would have to be known under the wrong name.

Now there is an email. Reunion. Thirty years later. The structure still exists in some form, though I have no reason to assume it resembles what I remember. Places don't persist the way memory suggests they do. People don't either. What persists is pattern. What persists is the recognition of that pattern when it reappears under different conditions.

I don't know what I will find if I go back, and I am not particularly interested in predicting it. Prediction has never been the point. Recognition is.

The question was never whether I would go. That part had already been answered. What remains is simply the act of stepping back into a place that once operated under incorrect assumptions and observing what, if anything, still exists. I said yes before anyone asked. That is the only part of this that has not changed.