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.

No Incident, No Accusation—Just The Quiet Correction Of My Existence

April 13, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

There are ways a person is removed that never use the word fired—no accusation, no incident, no line item anyone can point to later—just a quiet correction of presence, as if the system has decided it can function without you and no longer feels the need to pretend otherwise.

I had been at one of my first jobs for over a decade, long enough to understand the structure better than most, long enough to carry what needed carrying without being asked twice, and long enough to notice that none of it was ever acknowledged in a way that meant anything. Not the cost, not the consistency, not the fact that I kept showing up when others didn't.

The place had a baseball diamond on the property—something meant for games, for order, for rules that everyone agrees to follow—a field that had been the constant backdrop of my childhood and my first jobs. In the end, even that structure made more sense than the way I was let go.

When it ended, it didn't arrive as a decision I was included in—it arrived as absence, as a kind of administrative silence that translated cleanly into one thing: you are no longer required here. No explanation offered, none expected, just the removal of a role that had quietly defined years of my life without ever once recognizing the person inside it.

I drove my car through the gate like it was already open, straight across the field without slowing, the tires cutting a clean line through dirt that had been kept level for years. I aimed for home plate without thinking about it, because there wasn't anything left to think about.

I hit it dead on, then turned and took the bases in order—first, second, third—tight arcs, controlled, deliberate, like I was finishing something that had already ended in my head long before that day. By the time I came back around, I didn't ease in—I drove straight through home again, fast enough that it felt like a slide, the whole thing over in seconds but exact in a way that only comes from knowing you're not coming back.

Then I jerked the car back, accelerating toward the opening, crossed the field, and drove out the same way I came in. No hesitation, no second pass, no looking back. Just gone.

Some exits don't require permission—they arrive fully formed, long before anyone else recognizes them as departures.

A place can hold you for years, teach you its patterns, literally depend on your presence, and still fail to understand the exact moment you've already decided it no longer fits. I didn't leave quietly, but I didn't leave chaotically either—I left in a way that matched the structure I had always operated within. The action itself was visible, deliberate, impossible to misinterpret, and still, no one intervened.

That absence of response carried more information than any confrontation could have. It revealed a system that had learned to accommodate my presence without ever fully engaging with it, a place where even the clearest signal could pass through without consequence.

In the end, the departure wasn't defined by what I did, but by what followed—nothing. No correction, no resistance, no acknowledgment that something final had just occurred. And in that silence, the truth settled cleanly: I had already left long before I crossed the boundary, and what remained behind was simply a structure continuing without me, exactly as it always would have.