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.

The Errant Heat From A Star

October 11, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

This morning, I woke up severely depressed. Over the course of this year, I have lost numerous friendships, some of them decades in the making. These were people I knew for many years, people I genuinely believed would remain part of my life forever.

I have spent much of my life understanding friendship as the most meaningful form of love, and the gradual disappearance of people I once considered permanent has affected me more profoundly than I care to admit.

I asked my friends for help.

I do not ordinarily ask my friends to solve my problems, provide reassurance, or make themselves responsible for whatever emotional difficulty I happen to be experiencing. But this morning was different. I was grieving friendships I thought I would have for the rest of my life, and I needed to know that the people who remained were still there.

All I needed was a reply. Something as simple as a response to a text message was enough to remind me that I still had friends.

Everyone came through for me.

Later in the morning, Maddie texted me to say that she had woken up late at a friend's apartment in Plattsburgh, New York. I immediately replied, "on my way.”

I got into the Bronco and drove north.

When I arrived at the apartment, Maddie introduced me to her friend. I decided to take Maddie and Andrew to see the summer camp I had attended as a child. I had been wanting to return for years, although I had stopped by occasionally over the decades, hoping to recover whatever little bit of closure remained available to me.

The camp had fallen into disrepair, and each visit became less emotionally satisfying than the one before it. Eventually, the feelings I once associated with the place disappeared entirely. The memories remained, but the emotional attachment did not.

I used to crave camp. Up close, yet distant like the errant heat from a star.

For years, I believed that returning would somehow allow me to experience a small portion of what those summers once meant to me.

I remembered the pine trees, the lake, the cabins, the athletic field, the dining hall, and the strange freedom I experienced as a child who rarely felt comfortable anywhere else.

I remembered the people, the activities, the long summer evenings, and the extraordinary feeling of being alive. Then decades passed. Some of the people died. Others disappeared into lives that no longer included me. The buildings deteriorated, the ownership changed, and eventually the place became little more than a collection of structures containing memories that belonged almost entirely to me.

I told Maddie that before she was born, this was where I spent my summers as a teenager.

We walked around the property, and I showed her the cabins where I stayed during my first year, my second year, and the two years I spent in Wilderness. I showed her the cabin where I eventually worked as a counselor for three summers, which, ironically, was the same cabin where I had stayed during my very first year as a camper.

I had returned to camp repeatedly, first as a camper, then as a sixteen-year-old working in the kitchen, and eventually as a counselor. My association with the camp ended when I was fired during my third summer as a counselor.

I showed Maddie the exact spot among a cluster of trees where I had pitched a tent when I was sixteen. Dad had kicked me out, and I had returned to camp asking for a job. I spent the summer working in the kitchen and sleeping in my tent.

Then I showed Maddie and Andrew the athletic field where I sometimes carried the bedding out of my cabin and slept beneath the night sky. I loved doing that. One night, the entire camp spent the night on the athletic field. It was something that only happened one time in all the years I was there.

I never really fit in at camp. The staff mandated inclusion, but genuine friendships never seemed to form for me the way they did for everyone else.

I told Maddie and Andrew about some of the trauma I had experienced as a child, including sexual abuse and a period afterward when I stopped speaking for almost an entire year.

And yet, at the time, camp was quite literally the only reason I survived childhood at all.

One of the cabins still contained Molly's name written on the wall.

I knew exactly where to find it because I had discovered it during an earlier visit. Molly was one of my campers. I watched her grow over the years she attended camp, and I remember her as someone who occupied a meaningful part of those summers.

When I saw where Molly had written her name, I burst into tears. I told Andrew and Maddie about how I had known Molly and had been her camp counselor.

Molly died when she was twenty-five.

At some point during the visit, I told Maddie that I finally had the closure I needed from camp. Unless she expressed an overwhelming desire to return someday, I told her that I would probably never have a reason to come back. I meant it.

I have lived long enough to discover that closure is mostly a literary device. Real life leaves doors cracked open, conversations unfinished, objects in drawers, photographs without dates, and questions whose answers eventually become irrelevant.

And yet, today I found closure.

The memories were not all painful. Some were downright ridiculous.

The door to the dining hall was wide open, so naturally we went inside. I told Maddie and Andrew about the time in 1992 when the camp was conducting lost and found, and someone made the extraordinarily questionable decision to hand me a microphone.

During Lost And Found, I announced, “I lost my virginity.”

The camp director immediately told me to go outside and yelled at me. He informed me that the announcement was not funny, and threatened to report me to the camp owner.

Unfortunately for the director, the owner had already heard the announcement. He came over afterward, told me that he thought it was hilarious, and suggested that perhaps I should reserve that particular category of comedy for the staff in the future.

Maddie started laughing.

"Oh my God," she said.

Then she laughed some more.

We eventually made our way outside near the infirmary, where there was a view of the entire main building. I pointed toward the roof and told Andrew and Maddie about the time I got angry with my boss and decided to put his golf cart up there.

This was one of those decisions that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. I borrowed several aluminum extension ladders from the maintenance shed, covered them with two layers of plywood, and drove the golf cart onto the roof. I then dismantled the entire arrangement and returned the materials to the shed exactly where I had found them. There was no trace of how the cart had gotten up there.

My boss spent much of the morning looking for his missing golf cart. By lunchtime, he finally discovered that the vehicle was almost exactly where he had parked it, except that it was now considerably higher in elevation and also sitting on top of the main building.

He went inside, and the next thing I heard was someone shouting, "EMILY!!!"

I walked in and casually asked, "Hey... you called for me???"

He took me outside, pointed toward the roof, and looked at me.

"It's a golf cart," I said.

"I know it's a golf cart. But why is it on the roof?"

Rather than answer the question directly, I decided that negotiating the terms of the vehicle's return would probably be a more productive use of the conversation.

"If it were to get back to a nice patch of grass without getting damaged, am I still in trouble???”

He considered the situation and informed me that after lunch would be acceptable. He also instructed me not to let anyone see me.

Unfortunately, by that point, the entire camp had already seen the golf cart sitting on the roof. Several people gathered to watch the recovery operation, during which I slowly lowered the cart down the ladders using a rope belay behind me while someone held the brake down. The operation was successful, although I suspect it did very little to restore my boss's confidence in leaving motorized equipment unattended.

Andrew laughed, and gave me a fist bump with a nod of approval. Maddie listened to the entire story and eventually managed to summarize her assessment in a single word.

"Crazy."

I suppose that was fair.

I also pointed toward the chimney and told her about the time I decided to climb onto the roof and sit on the flat slab at the top. Nobody ever thought to look for me there. I liked the quiet, the extraordinary view of the lake, and the ability to observe almost everything happening around camp simultaneously.

Very few things turned out the way I imagined they would, and I guess it became a life lesson in patience.

After leaving camp, the three of us returned to Plattsburgh for sushi. I parked the Bronco, stepped out, and happened to notice that I had parked directly in front of In Living Color Tattoo Studio.

I stood there for a moment, genuinely surprised. It was the same place where I got my very first tattoo in 1998, a small blue dolphin above my left ankle. I was astonished to discover that it was still there twenty-eight years later.

I showed Maddie and Andrew the tattoo.

It seemed appropriate, somehow, that after spending the afternoon visiting a place that, for a time, meant everything to me, I would unexpectedly find myself standing in front of another place from my youth. I had carried that little dolphin with me through almost my entire adult life. Careers, relationships, houses, cars, friendships, and enormous portions of my life had changed since 1998, but the dolphin remained exactly where I put it.

We had sushi together, and I continued telling Maddie and Andrew about the importance of camp to my childhood. I explained that it was not simply somewhere I enjoyed going during the summer. Camp had literally kept me alive.

I thought about all of this on the drive home.

I am forty-seven years old now. I have survived childhood, decades of emergency services, extraordinary experiences, heartbreak, grief, abandonment, and the deaths of people I loved.

I have lived enough life to recognize that being different was never the problem. The problem was how frequently other people expected me to become someone else for their convenience.

Today, on the way home, I decided that I am never changing who I am.