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 Friends Who Love Me

Amanda arrived at eight this morning. She was first to know.

I sat down on the living room couch yesterday morning and told Amanda my entire life story, giving her only the most important points prior to the time we met at age seven, then I somehow managed to compress the decades we spent apart into the couple of hours she was here helping me paint the interior of Mom's house.

We discussed all the little details of my misadventures through life, the abuse I suffered from my father, the running away, falling in love, coming out, getting fucked over, then finally becoming wildly successful.

I said see you later to Amanda and then went to Oneonta to get a tattoo—my third tattoo acquired on Main Street in Oneonta. The tattoo is based on my own drawings and is on the left side of my lower ribs.

This morning, Amanda arrived promptly at eight in the morning. I made Amanda a cup of coffee, decaf, with cream and sugar. Then mine. Regular with extra cream. Then it started.

I sat down on the couch in Mom’s living room, Amanda turned off her true crime audiobook, and we started talking about my present day—it was time for time expansion.

We started with the relationship I had with my mother in the last years of her life. I said that Mom absolutely adored Amelia, and that Amelia and Allegra were the only two I brought home that she actually liked and approved of. Dad, however, was impossible to please. He demanded that I focus on my studies and career and success, and that I was to never have a relationship until he deemed me ready.

I got my first tattoo at age eighteen in Plattsburgh, New York in the summer of 1998. It was my first year as a camp counselor.

Dad was furious.

I lost my virginity to another girl at age twenty in my childhood bedroom at Mom’s house when my parents were on vacation. She was a friend I had known for many years who had grown up in the area.

Dad was furious. Again.

This morning, while I was taking my morning shower, I finally decided what I want to do with the rest of my life. And that is to be there for the friends who love me.

Amelia, Maddie, Nora, Amanda, and Makayla are the kinds of friends that remind me of the true meaning of friendship.

Amanda and I talked at length about how I had met Amelia, and how in 2020 Amelia came to stay with me at the farm. Our relationship had been nearly perfect from the beginning. We never fought, and our disagreements always seemed to end in some sort of compromise. So when Amelia announced that she wanted to leave me and Vermont, it came as a shock to me.

I loved Amelia enough to understand that loving her did not give me ownership over the rest of her life.

We had spent our entire relationship solving disagreements through compromise. I told Amanda that I think one of the hardest things I have ever learned about loving someone is knowing when to let them choose something I would never have chosen for them. Dad spent much of my life trying to decide when I was ready to love someone, who I should be, what I should accomplish, and what my life was supposed to look like. I had no desire to spend the rest of my own life doing the same thing to the people I loved.

The very first thing I learned at the New York State fire academy is to always take care of the people and things that take care of you. Because one day, when you least expect it, you will need both.

This morning, I told Amanda that I decided that from now on, my small circle of friends that I have are going to become my top priority—they are chosen family, always, and no matter what.

After Amanda left, I sent Amelia a text and told her what I had decided. My friends were going to become my top priority. They were my chosen family, and that decision was final.