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.

Measuring The Distance Between Then And Now

July 7, 2026—Los Angeles, California

Today began at 5 AM on 75th Street in Los Angeles, which is a strange sentence to write from inside a life I did not always expect to survive. I woke in a house rental with Maddie and Sylvester, on the second day of Disneyland. And then I thought, how in the actual fuck did I survive the life I led?

There are questions one asks because one wants answers, and I was not looking for an explanation. I am in Los Angeles with people I love. I am alive in a life that would have seemed almost impossible to explain to certain earlier versions of myself, and some part of me had apparently decided that 5 AM was the correct time to contemplate the distance between then and now.

I washed my clothes in the kitchen sink. There is something clarifying about these small acts of maintenance, especially in unfamiliar places. A house rental is not home, but it becomes briefly inhabited through the ordinary evidence of human presence: damp towels, borrowed mugs, cell phone chargers, shoes by the door, and sometimes even clothes washed in the sink because travel does not exempt anyone from laundry.

After that, I took a shower and cried, because until recent years, I lived a miserable existence. Miserable.

I think misery is often easier to survive while it is happening than it is to understand afterward. During it, there is always something urgent enough to keep the mind from looking directly at the whole of it. The older I become, the less interested I am in destinations, and the more fascinated by the routes people took to arrive there.

There was my work, which consisted entirely of obligations. The next presenting problem, the next patient, the next rescue, the next series of impossible decision making. Given enough time, survival becomes procedural. One does not ask what the life means. One only asks what has to happen next.

This morning, I thought about all that I have done in my life and how quietly most of it happened. There were no flash bulbs. No photograph of me hanging on a wall of honor. There was no public installation of memory declaring that I had been there, that I had done the work, that I had mattered in the places where people needed someone to matter. It was my job. I was told I did it exceptionally well. And to me, that means everything.

Knowing that I had a positive impact on the communities I served and the people I helped means everything to me. Someone was helped. A situation became less chaotic. A person was not alone in the moment when being alone would have made everything worse. A scene had direction. A community was served by someone who was trusted enough to know exactly what she was doing and cared enough to do it well.

I have seen enough emergencies to know that if there are bystanders, there are usually a handful of good people present, or at least people capable of becoming useful the moment someone gives them direction. This is one of the things I know that I did not learn from theory. I learned it from roadsides, bedrooms, kitchens, fire scenes, wrecked cars, bad scenes, bad timing, and all the strange locations where an ordinary day becomes divided into before and after. People freeze. People panic. People stare. People say things that are nonsensical because fear has temporarily taken over.

The world is not as mean and cruel as we are taught to believe. There is a kind of goodness that cannot appear until someone makes a place for it to stand.

When I was a young girl, I dreamed of being an astronomer. At the time, I probably understood this as a career goal, but now I suspect it was also an instinct. I wanted distance. I wanted scale. I wanted questions large enough that nobody in my immediate world could shrink them into rules, paperwork, shame, or ever-changing household rules. I wanted to understand things that were far away and greater than anything I could ever possibly imagine, because the things close to me so often made no sense. Some things still don’t make sense to me.

I did not become an astronomer. Instead, I became someone who studied other forms of darkness. I studied emergencies. I learned first hand what fear does to a human. I studied what grief does to a family. I studied the exact instant when a person realizes that the days events have become irreversible. I studied the silence after impact, the voice of someone trying not to panic, the posture of a person about to collapse, and the way people look at the one person on scene who seems to know what happens next. It was not the life I imagined as a girl, but some part of the girl who wanted the stars remained intact. I was still looking into darkness. I was still trying to understand what I was seeing.

The world insists on measuring success in numbers—income, followers, awards, publications, square footage. None of those things have ever answered the only question that mattered to me: Who would answer the phone if I called at three o’clock in the morning?

Even now, I still do not know the answers. I do not know why my life had to be as hard as it was for as long as it was. I do not know why I survived what I survived. I do not know why competence became one of my earliest forms of camouflage, or why I had to become so useful before I was ever allowed to feel safe.

I have never trusted anyone who claimed to have all the answers. The interesting people are still collecting better questions. The world is filled with experts. Wisdom remains surprisingly uncommon. I no longer confuse being loud with being right.

I have never trusted anyone who claimed to have all the answers. The interesting people are still collecting better questions.

I do not know why some people are given softness early while others are expected to manufacture it later from whatever hope still remains.

There are friendships that cannot be replicated, or replaced. There are people whose place in a life becomes specific through a combination of timing, trust, choice, history, and patience.

Maddie has become one of the people through whom I understand friendship more clearly than I used to. With her, I do not feel like a contradiction that needs to be corrected before I can be loved. Instead, for the very first time in my life, I feel known in the present tense.