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 Lie Around Me

June 25, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

I'm going to moms for a week starting tomorrow. My bags are packed, but the car isn't loaded yet. I want to leave when the moment feels right, not when it's supposed to be right.

That feels important somehow.

There are departures that begin when the car starts, and there are departures that begin hours earlier when the bags are already packed, and the person leaving is still standing in the middle of her own life waiting for the moment to announce itself. I have spent too much of my life leaving places because someone else decided I no longer belonged there.

This is apparently what counts as emotional preparedness in my life. Packed bags, unlabeled grief, and a car that has not yet been loaded because I am negotiating terms with the atmosphere.

I cried in the shower this morning. I thought about how my friends are lucky in that when their parents gave birth to a daughter, they were cherished. Mom cherished me. She treated me like a friend since the day we met. Always best friends first, mom only when she needed to be. As for Dad, it was a different story. Me identifying as female, let alone actually being female at birth, led me to receive beatings that often left bruises. I remember how wonderful it felt to go to summer camp and actually have skin that looked soft and white, instead of bruised and sick as hell.

I do not know why grief prefers the shower. Maybe because water already knows how to fall. Maybe because crying there requires no explanation. Tears become anonymous. The body is allowed to grieve without making a public announcement. There is a mercy in that, even if the mercy arrives through soap, hot water, and shampoo bottles lined up like emotionally unqualified witnesses.

Mom died last October.

That fact still does not behave correctly inside me. I know it. I have said it. I wrote her obituary. I touched the things she left behind. I opened drawers, found objects, sorted through decades of accumulation, and stood in rooms where she had been alive so recently that her absence still felt like a scheduling mistake. And yet, there are still moments when my mind reaches for her as though she is busy, asleep, across town, upstairs, or about to call me and ask if I can come house sit because she and my father are going away for a few days.

The dead leave behind practical problems first. Mail, keys, bills, closets, boxes, old medication, expired food, paperwork, tools, photographs, and the quiet hostility of forms that require the living to prove the dead are no longer available to answer questions. Grief may be spiritual, emotional, and impossible, but it is also administered by utility companies, probate, voicemail prompts, and some woman in an office who wants to know whether you have the correct account number.

It almost feels like some sort of inspiration to return to a life that I used to have before it was taken away from me by my father. I remember when I sold my dad's estate, everyone told me exactly what they thought I should do with the money. You can afford it, they said. And yet, I didn't change anything. I don't want my life to change. I want to continue living life the only way I know how, which is exactly how I have been living it for the past 46 years.

People assume money is permission to become someone else. They say it with enthusiasm, as if they are offering helpful advice instead of casually suggesting that I abandon the life I fought to keep, and came very close to losing. Buy something bigger. Move somewhere else. Upgrade. Expand. Reward yourself.

You can afford it, they said.

They never seemed to understand that some of us are not waiting for permission to stop being ourselves.

I did not want a larger life. I wanted a life that finally stopped being taken away from me. That is a different thing entirely. I wanted the same books, the same coffee, the same tools, the same projects, the same friends, the same mountains, the same cluttered tables, the same ordinary rituals that had accumulated slowly enough to become proof that I had survived. Money did not make me want extravagance. It made me realize how little extravagance had to do with anything I truly cherished.

What always intrigued me about moms house was the fact that the first night I slept in the house, I stayed on a futon mattress that was placed directly on the floor where the headboard of my parents' bed was eventually placed.

It was the same spot that at age 16, after an afternoon of Dad being silent, he called me into my parents' bedroom and in front of my mom told me that he would not tolerate his "son becoming his daughter"; he went on to tell me that I was out of the house, so if I wanted to "have a sex change I might as well because I was never coming home." It was the evening following being told that I was intersex, genetically female, and likely completely sterile by my primary doctor who finally broke the silence and had the courage to tell me the truth. Dad lost his shit.

It is difficult to explain what it feels like to have medical truth arrive as liberation and injury at the same time. The doctor finally told me the truth, but the truth came carrying sterility, secrecy, and the realization that other people had known things about my body before I was allowed to know them myself.

I was sixteen. I was a girl. I had always been a girl. I had autism. I was also intersex—genetically female, and likely sterile. Those facts did not make me less real. They made the lie around me more visible.

My father did not respond to the truth. He responded to the loss of control.

He acted as though my body had betrayed him personally. He acted as though the doctor had created me instead of finally naming what had been there all along. He stood in that bedroom and tried to turn the truth of my body into an offense against his authority. When he said he would not tolerate his "son becoming his daughter," he said it as if I had been a son who had wandered into girlhood through poor discipline, bad influence, or insufficient career planning.

That was the part he could never survive. Not that I loved women. Not even that I was female. It was that both were true at the same time, and neither required his permission.

Some two decades later, he would get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, his pacemaker would suddenly fail, and he would die in the same spot.

Reality should not be allowed to write like that.

A futon, a headboard, an ultimatum, a doctor's truth, a father's rage, and a death all occupying the same square of floor. Fiction would be accused of overdoing it. Reality has no such obligation. Reality simply leaves the room standing and waits for someone to notice.

I noticed.

Some time in 1986, when I spent my first few nights at moms house, the local Kiwanis Club put on a free carnival down the street at the old Victory supermarket location on Main Street in Stamford. I remember meeting Angie there, and thinking she was cute, but our lives kept us in close proximity for many years like two ships that pass in the night. We talked about it the days before Angie suddenly accused me of cheating on her during our relationship, which is untrue.

That is one of the cruel things memory does. It does not organize people according to how badly the ending hurt. It remembers the beginning first. It remembers the carnival lights, the old supermarket lot, the brief noticing, the strange fact that someone can enter your life first as a passing impression and remain there for decades.

I kept seeing her, briefly, for only a series of passing moments in the summer. Angie worked at Minekill State Park as a lifeguard and also at the snack bar. In 1991, when my parents sent me away to summer camp for the first time, she was out of my life and out of my mind for awhile.

Angie belonged to summer before she belonged to anything else. The snack bar. The water. Minekill. Passing glimpses. A girl seen briefly enough that longing had no place to land, but often enough that her presence became part of the season. I did not yet know what all of that meant. Or maybe I knew exactly what it meant and simply had no safe place to put the knowing.

My father used to tell me that women were a distraction I didn't need, and that what I needed to do was to focus on my education and getting a degree so that I could get a well-paying job, and that being paid well was a prerequisite to not only making my father proud, but was the gate he kept to me being allowed to fall in love.

That was never about education. It was about control.

Women were not a distraction. Women were the part of my life he could not govern without inventing a system of requirements. Degree first. Job first. Money first. Approval first. Love later. Sex later. Desire later. Womanhood never, if he had any say in it.

He demanded grandchildren, specifically a male grandchild. And he specified that this child was to be named Harvey, after his grandfather.

He spoke about women as though they were obstacles to achievement, which is strange, considering I was a woman sitting directly in front of him. He imagined my attraction to women as something masculine, something to be delayed until I had earned the right to participate in the version of adulthood he had designed for the son he insisted on having. But I was not a son distracted by women. I was his daughter, and I loved women as a lesbian. That distinction was not subtle. It was simply inconvenient to him.

And here's the thing. I didn't need an education. And the one I was given, the modern American post-industrialized educational system doesn't look favorably upon people with autism, like me.

Schools often confused compliance with intelligence, obedience with character, and paperwork with truth. I was autistic before anyone around me had the necessary humility to understand what that meant. I was curious before anyone had the good sense to stop punishing curiosity for arriving in the wrong shape. I learned from tools, radios, cameras, notebooks, emergency scenes, municipal infrastructure, old roads, night skies, trauma, machinery, friendships, sex, grief, and the ordinary dignity of things that continued working, even after someone else had long since decided they were broken.

I did not need education as my father defined it. I needed freedom. He thought education would make me worthy of work, money, approval, women, sex, and love. Life, in its usual disregard for his authority, gave me women first.

Ironically, it was at camp, where I was enrolled as a boy by my father, and of course, under a boy's name which nobody called me—ever—where I fell in love with a girl named Allegra who was from Boston. I still love her in some distant nostalgic way that will be forever meaningless materially. As for Allegra… The world felt temporarily repairable beneath that particular constellation of stars. She spoke about the future as if it was something survivable.

That was the first great contradiction of camp. My father sent me there under a name that did not belong to me, in a category that did not hold me, after years of trying to solve me with pressure, shame, and objects. Yet camp became one of the places where my body healed enough for my skin to look like skin again. It was also where I fell in love.

There are people we do not end up with who still alter the atmosphere of our inner lives. Allegra never became mine in any material sense. But I ended up never actually being with Allegra, and instead dated other women, and married Amelia in my 40's. Still, there is a version of me that remembers what it felt like to be near a girl who could talk about tomorrow without sounding afraid of it. For someone who had been told home was conditional, the future was not an abstract concept. It was a threat with calendar pages.

Allegra made it seem survivable. That mattered.

I met Amelia in the same vicinity of where Allegra grew up. Before we married, I told Amelia that I hoped she wasn't counting on me to be monogamous, and that it was a very likely possibility that I would never stop having sex with my friends. She said it was okay, and we married, and now enjoy a truly fantastic marriage.

There is no graceful way to explain this to people who believe love is legitimate only when it arrives pre-approved, monogamous, easily labeled, publicly defensible, and emotionally convenient. Fortunately, I have never had much faith in public approval, nor its foundation in modern religion. Public approval is often just conformity wearing cleaner clothes.

What mattered was that Amelia knew the truth before she married me. I did not hide the shape of my heart, my friendships, my body, my desire, or the fact that intimacy and loyalty have never lived in separate rooms inside me. I told her what I believed was true. I told her that sex with friends was not some theoretical possibility filed away under unlikely circumstances. I told her it was part of how my life had often been shaped, part of how closeness sometimes happened for me, part of the way love, friendship, comfort, desire, and survival had occasionally crossed the same bridge.

She said it was okay. And then she married me.

My father saw women as a reward to be earned after achievement. Amelia saw me as a whole person before marriage. My dad made love conditional. She made honesty possible.

I know what it feels like to be told that I had to leave today. I know what it feels like to have nothing, and to have to rely on the kindness of strangers. My car always smelled faintly like gasoline, coffee, wool blankets, and winter gloves drying on the dashboard.

I'd stop by moms house from time to time. But for years and years I roamed. For many years, there was nobody else around me. Except for Mom, I had nobody to answer the phone if I called. My mom would call me and ask me to house sit while she and my father went on vacation. For anywhere from a few days to two weeks, I would have full access to moms house, and as she would leave, she would tell me that "our rules" applied when Dad wasn't home—she and I had established a smaller subset of simple common sense rules that paled in comparison to the ones Dad accused me of not following.

"Our rules."

Those two words still mean more than they probably should, which means they mean exactly as much as they need to.

Dad's rules were about control. Mom's rules were about trust. Dad's rules tried to manage identity, desire, education, money, love, sex, speech, timing, and the unbearable inconvenience of me being authentic.

Mom's rules were practical. Don't leave the stove on or you'll burn the house down. Lock the doors. Use common sense. Feed whatever needs feeding. Leave things better than you found them. Act like someone trusted to exist.

There is no small mercy in being trusted after years of being accused.

My late father had one very specific rule—no women because I hadn't gotten my college degree, job, etc. Mom asked me to change the sheets on their bed. After they left, I invited my girlfriend over, and we changed the sheets as Mom asked. Then I had the bright idea of "showing my father up." I had lesbian sex in my parents' bed, but on the side my dad slept on. I made the bed as usual without washing the sheets. Because, fuck my dad.

I know exactly how that sounds. I also know exactly what it meant.

It was not simply about sex. It was about his one rule. No women. No sex. No love. No desire. No lesbian daughter. No female body unless he could deny it. No womanhood unless he could rename it as rebellion. No intimacy unless I had satisfied his requirements for adulthood, success, salary, and obedience.

So I brought a woman into the bed where he slept. On his side. That detail mattered.

It mattered because the bed was not neutral. The bedroom was not neutral. The house was not neutral. That room contained his authority, his silence, his ultimatum, his body, his rules, his inability to tolerate reality, and the particular cruelty of a man trying to decide when his daughter was allowed to love women. I did not wash the sheets because the act was not complete until his authority had to return to the bed without knowing what had happened there.

That was not maturity. It was not intended to be.

Some acts of defiance are not ethical essays. Some are blunt instruments. Some are ugly, funny, necessary, childish, righteous, petty, and spiritually accurate all at once. Some acts belong under the category of Necessary, Under The Circumstances, Though Perhaps Not Suitable For A Church Newsletter.

The body remembers where it was denied. The body also remembers where it refused.

The world contains far more kindness than headlines would suggest. There is always more room in a heart that is broken or simply left open on purpose.

I know that because strangers helped me when I had nothing.

I love my friends, even if nobody understands why. My friends are my everything, and they are the only people I've ever had that I truly cherished.

My friends include Amelia and Mom. They made life bearable when family became conditional, systems became hostile, and the future became something I could not always see clearly enough to trust.

My friends were the people who knew versions of me that did not require translation. Sometimes they were the people who sat beside me. Sometimes they were the people who answered the phone. Sometimes they were the people I wanted. Sometimes they were the people I slept with. Sometimes those categories overlapped like relationship Venn diagrams because human beings are not as tidy as morality manuals suggest.

Friendship is what happens when two people decide each other's existence is worth remembering.

Not remembering in the shallow sense. Not birthdays entered into phones because software has become the modern conscience. I mean remembering what matters. The song someone loved. The way their voice changed when they were trying not to cry. The thing they were proud of but did not want to announce too loudly. The fear they confessed once and never spoke of again. The way they looked at you when the rest of the world had misnamed you, dismissed you, or tried to make your existence conditional.

Some people leave your life all at once. Others leave one conversation at a time.

I think that is why false accusations hurt the way they do. When Angie accused me of cheating, it was not only about sex. It was about someone else trying to rewrite the terms of a relationship I had actually lived. Cheating is one of those words people can use like a weapon because it makes the accused person appear selfish, dishonest, and sexually careless before they have even had the chance to speak. It takes intimacy, loyalty, memory, desire, and turns them into evidence for the prosecution.

But I know what happened. And I know what did not.

My father tried to rewrite my womanhood. Angie tried to rewrite my faithfulness. The two things are not the same, but they belong in the same emotional country because both involved someone else standing in front of my life and insisting their version of reality had more authority than mine.

I am tired of people who were not there trying to narrate what happened. I was there. Of course I remember. Every generation leaves behind a trail of practical knowledge that nobody thought to write down.

I think that is why I miss the little things. Things that I had in the 90's, like mixtapes where there was a kind of mercy in the silence between songs.

The silence mattered because it gave you room to exist between feelings. A song ended, and the tape hissed, and for a few seconds nothing demanded anything from you. The next song did not arrive instantly, aggressive and algorithmic, as though silence were a design flaw. It came after a breath. It came after the machine turned just enough to remind you that someone had chosen this order by hand, and the time between felt organic.

People used to do that too, or maybe memory has become generous in ways reality never earned. But I miss the pace of it. I miss waiting for the phone. I miss not being reachable every second. I miss driving with coffee, bad reception, and a cassette case sliding around on the passenger seat. I miss knowing that someone made a tape because they wanted another person to understand something they could not quite say directly. A mixtape was evidence of attention.

So was sex—sometimes. Not always. Sometimes sex was just sex, which is perfectly acceptable and occasionally useful. But sometimes sex was proof that my body belonged to me. Sometimes it was comfort. Sometimes it was rebellion. Sometimes it was a continuation of friendship by other means. Sometimes it was a way of saying, I am here, you are here, and for a while the world cannot have us. Sometimes it was not romantic at all. Sometimes it was more honest than romance because it did not pretend to be a future. It only admitted the present.

I think people often dislike that kind of honesty because it refuses to flatter the story they were given. The things we repeat become the things we are.

Dad repeated control until control became the only language he trusted.

Mom repeated kindness, trust, and acceptance. I repeated leaving until movement became instinct. I repeated friendship until loyalty became indistinguishable from blood. I repeated sex without shame until my body became less of a battleground and more of a place I actually lived. I repeated writing until memory had somewhere to go. I repeated love until even grief could not take it away from me.

I have lost many things in my life. Love has never been one of them. And when everyone else is gone, I will still be here.

That is not arrogance. It is not even confidence, exactly. It is a fact. I have been told to leave. I have had nothing. I have slept in cars and returned to houses that contained both love, and violence. I have been misnamed, misunderstood, desired, accused, cherished, dismissed, forgiven, forgotten, remembered, and loved.

I have loved women I never dated, women I did, friends I slept with, friends I did not, a wife who knew the truth before she married me, and a mother who made space for "our rules" inside a house ruled too often by someone else's fear.

Tomorrow, or whenever the moment feels right, I will load the car. I will go back to moms house.

The house will do what it always does. It will become a living reminder of a time between sixteen, and now at forty-six, and every version of me who ever stood there trying to understand what kind of life she was supposed to have after so many people had tried to tell her, and the girl who survived long enough to become the woman returning on her own terms.