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.

People Like That Leave Behind A Change In The Air

May 6, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

I returned from Mom's yesterday afternoon, after stopping in at Angie's place to return some of her belongings that were still at Mom's house. It should have felt simple. A small errand. A bag or box handed over. The kind of thing people do all the time without assigning it any special weight. But nothing connected to Mom's house feels simple anymore.

Angie told me that she still loved me, and the sentence landed with a weight I did not know where to put. In full autistic fashion, I stimmed and bit my lower lip, not because I did not understand what she meant, but because I understood it too clearly and too late for it to become simple. I reminded her that I had autism.

Angie loves through romance. I love through friendship. That was the mismatch we spent nearly twenty years trying to translate into something functional, and maybe that is why the ending never fit cleanly into the category of failure.

It was not that our relationship failed. Our bonding styles simply did not match up. She kept reaching for me through the language of partnership, and I kept reaching back through the language of loyalty, proximity, shared history, and practical devotion. We were not absent of love. We were full of it, just organized differently, and sometimes love is not enough to make two internal systems speak the same language.

I had offered Mom's car as a gift to a family friend months ago. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, or at least the kindest. I did not need it. Someone else might. That was the entire calculation. Clean. Practical. Human. But they remained indecisive about it for months, and grief does not make indefinite patience easier.

Estate lawyers do not care that people are uncertain. They do not care that a car once belonged to your mother. To them, it is title, transfer, asset, liability, timeline. To them, love is not admissible unless it has paperwork attached.

In the eleventh hour, with Mom's estate lawyers pressuring me to transfer it, I sold it to an old friend from childhood. That was the decision. Not the one I thought I would make, necessarily, but the one that made sense when the window started closing and I had tired of calling and reminding them of the deadline. I have learned that some decisions do not arrive because you are ready. They arrive because everyone else is finished waiting for you to be.

Mom is gone, and suddenly everything changed. And the thing is, I'm 46, and I still don't know the answers. I do not know when it is assumed that generosity becomes obligation. I do not know when patience becomes self-betrayal. I do not know when a casual friend becomes safe, or when a safe person becomes casual. I do not know why grief makes some people kinder and others slightly more transactional. I do not know why a car can feel like a moral dilemma, or why returning someone's belongings can feel like closing a door no one admitted was open.

Yesterday's breakfast was at TP's Cafe. Heather was working that morning. I ordered my usual breakfast—western omelette with cheddar cheese, rye toast, home fries, and coffee. Strawberry preserves for my toast. They got my order right as usual, which should not have mattered as much as it did.

But it did.

There is a kind of mercy in a place that still knows what you order. The reliability of someone bringing rye toast instead of white, strawberry preserves instead of grape in those little packets, coffee poured into your mug without needing to request more of it. A western omelette with cheddar cheese, because that is what I always get. Home fries, because breakfast needs different textures. Coffee, because civilization requires it.

When I go there, I try to sit by the window where I can look out on the same street that raised me. The same street where all my friends lived. The same street where childhood happened before anyone understood that childhood was temporary. Some of those friends I see all the time. Some I hear from now and then. But for the majority of them, I have not seen or heard from them ever again.

That is one of the strangest parts of middle age. Not loss, exactly. Disappearance without announcement. Entire friendships that once seemed permanent simply thinning out until there is nothing left to hold. No final conversation. No betrayal. No dramatic exit. Just time doing what time does when nobody interrupts it. People move, marry, have children, divorce, change names, change states, grow old, become strangers, die, or become so thoroughly absorbed into the lives they built that the person who once knew them in childhood becomes a decorative fact at best. The street raised me, but it did not keep everyone. Maybe no street can. Maybe that is expecting too much from pavement.

I sat by the window at TP's Cafe and looked out at the place where everything once felt permanent because I did not yet understand permanence was mostly a childhood misunderstanding. The houses where my friends lived are still there in some form, though most of the people are not. The old gravitational friendships are gone. What remains is the architecture of memory without the population that once made it feel inhabited.

Timothy Touhey's gallery on Main Street burned. I keep thinking about that too, because some losses are not content to stay in one category. A gallery is a building, technically. A storefront. Walls. A door. A space where objects and sound and conversation once gathered. But Tim's gallery was never only a gallery to me. Timothy Touhey was a long-time friend of my family, and he continued to be a major part of my life when I came to visit. He passed away long before his time. He was a talented artist, composer, and writer.

People like that do not simply die. They leave behind a change in the air. They alter the way a town sounds when you walk through it. Main Street is still Main Street, but without him, and without that gallery, something essential has gone missing. Not loudly. Not in a way tourists would notice. But the absence is there, standing in plain sight. The kind of absence that only makes sense if you knew the person, knew the building, knew the particular gravity of his presence. Some people become part of the emotional infrastructure of a place without anyone realizing it until they are gone. The town remains, but it no longer functions in quite the same way.

There are too many absences lately. Mom. Tim. The gallery. The friends who left town. The friends who stayed, but not in ways that included me. The family friend who could not decide about the car until the decision was no longer theirs to make. The version of me who believed that history gave people a better claim to trust. I no longer believe that. History explains proximity. It does not prove care.

Being known for a long time is not the same thing as being known well. A person can know your childhood street, your parents' names, your old dog, the house you grew up in, the general outline of your life, and still fail completely to understand the woman standing in front of them.

Madeline Grace O'Malley is my best and closest friend besides Amelia.

There are people who have remained real while other things have become uncertain. There are people whose presence does not require me to translate myself into something easier to shelve. Maddie is one of those friends who sees me fully for who I really am.

After breakfast, the day kept moving in that ordinary way days do when they refuse to acknowledge what a person is carrying. Coffee cooled. Plates were cleared. Someone laughed nearby. Heather worked her shift. The street outside continued being itself.

I am 46, and I still do not know what to do with that.

I only know what happened.