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.

Remember The Girl Who Never Really Left

June 12, 2026—Stamford, New York (Mom's House)

Today was hot. Not pleasantly warm, not the sort of summer day people remember fondly years later, but the kind of heat that settles onto your shoulders and refuses to leave. Stamford humidity has always possessed a special talent for making every minor inconvenience feel slightly larger than it actually is. By afternoon, even small frustrations seemed determined to test my patience.

Last night I walked across the street to John's Tavern and met my friend Nora.

At one point she asked me what it was like being back.

I opened my mouth to answer and realized I had no idea. The honest answer is that I still don't know.

Nobody tells you how you are supposed to feel when you return to a place that spent years trying to convince you that you did not belong there, only to discover that people finally respect you after you've already built your life somewhere else. I don't think I have the words for that yet.

In some ways, I am grateful.

For the first time in my life, Stamford seems proud that I came from here. The newspapers that once covered my career later wrote about my books. Those same papers published the obituary I wrote for Mom. There is something strangely beautiful about that. Her legacy passed quietly into mine through the ordinary rites of society.

People know my name. Some know me as a photographer. Some remember me from the fire department. Others know me as a writer. The strange thing is that I spent so many years wanting exactly that, only to discover that recognition arrives decades after it would have mattered most.

After Nora and I parted ways for the evening, I found myself upstairs in my old bedroom.

I had forgotten how good it feels to sit in my room and just stare out the big windows overlooking the back yard.

My bedroom was the one at the top of the stairs with the oversized windows, the triangular closet that protruded awkwardly into the guest room, and the curio cabinet missing its door because I needed to push my bed against the wall behind the door to feel safe. Some things have changed. Most things haven't.

When my parents moved us here in 1986, my mom told my father that I had the choice of bedroom. My father reluctantly agreed. I've had this room ever since, even though my extended absence from this place feels like being a ghost of someone who lived long ago who unexpectedly returned one day.

I sat there listening to music from my younger days and found myself wondering how in the fuck I survived.

There are a handful of people I've met who no longer remember me. Time does that. Years pass. Faces blur. Lives drift apart. But the people who still do remember me haven't forgotten the versions of me I never outgrew.

For years I thought adulthood meant becoming someone else. Now I suspect it means carrying the same person farther than you ever expected. The earliest version of me turned out to be the one that survived.

The best photographs preserve a moment. The rare ones preserve a feeling. My room is now filled with the few random things I thought I had lost in what feels like another lifetime. It is the little things that matter most to me. A number stamp I lost in the bottom drawer of my desk sometime around August of 1991. And of course, a notebook.

Those objects accompanied me through my first year at summer camp. The camera and notebook were part of a bribe from my father when he enrolled me there as a boy. Looking back, I think Dad often tried to solve emotional problems with physical objects. If something was wrong, he bought something. If a situation became complicated, he looked for a transaction instead of a conversation. In my case specifically, everything was always my fault.

His solution was to use immersive positive reinforcement to match his high expectations. Exclusive Greenwich Village daycare, private tuition at one of the finer private schools in New York City. The mansion in Stamford, which, unfortunately for me at the time, ended up being short-lived.

The strange thing is that sometimes it worked, though not in the way he intended. The camera helped create a photographer. The notebooks helped create a writer. The objects remained long after the argument that produced them was forgotten.

What never worked was the underlying assumption that I could somehow be reshaped into someone else. Dad could buy schools, camps, cameras, tutors, unbelievable larger-than-life experiences, and opportunities. What he could never purchase was, what he referred to as, a socially-acceptable child.

I am not over the loss of my mother. I'm sad that she's no longer here. Sad that I can't call her and tell her that there apparently is evidence that I survived, and that what I had spent a lifetime hoping for arrived slowly over the course of several months after she passed.

I know in my heart of hearts that restoring Mom's house while at the same time customizing it into the version I would have loved as a child is not only what I need, but also the right thing to do.

I feel like changing some things while keeping most things the same is a good balance. In some ways it feels like an invitation to live life as though middle adulthood belonged to another time. Maybe what I need is not to go back, but to remember the girl who never really left.