EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

The Way Things Settle Over Time

January 26, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

Maybe in another lifetime, or some half-forgotten dream, the difference would not feel so loud. Maybe it would pass unnoticed, like weather moving through, like something that never needed explaining. I imagine a version of time where I am not an exception, not a footnote, not something to be interpreted. Just present, intact, unremarkable in the best possible way—and left alone because nothing about me needs correcting.

Hidden language—like trespasses against what we were rumored to want—has always moved quietly, never announcing itself, never needing permission. It lives in what goes unsaid, in expectations assigned secondhand, in the small, unrecorded moments where wanting the wrong thing is treated like a breach of contract. Nothing dramatic ever happens—just a look, a pause, a subtle rewriting of the story. Still, the message lands. I learned to read that language early, not because I agreed with it, but because knowing where the edges are has always mattered more than pretending they do not exist.

The last few years taught me impermanence the hard way—and with it, the quiet obligation to do right by people while there is still time. Words blur, places fade, timelines collapse into a handful of impressions, but the feeling remains exact. What stays is how safe someone felt, or unseen, or steadied for a moment when everything else was slipping. I have learned to measure my days less by what I built or said, and more by whether I left anyone lighter than I found them—because that is the part no one forgets.

Maddie and Andrew came up to the farm and stayed the night, the kind of visit that settles into the house without ceremony. We drove to Five Guys in Rutland, talked, let the hours stretch the way they only do when no one is rushing anywhere. By Sunday morning the snow had already started, thick and deliberate, the kind that erases edges and insists you stay put. I did not go outside at all.

After they left, Angie called. Late enough that the house had already gone quiet again. We talked for a while, the way people do when they know each other well enough not to perform. Somewhere in the middle of it, I realized something that had been sitting just out of reach for years—that she was my first real relationship. Nearly twenty years of shared life, which sounds impossible until I remember how much time can pass when you are busy surviving it.

She was the only woman I ever fell in love with where it was not built solely on friendship, not buffered by distance or detachment. That love was direct, unguarded, and real in a way I did not know how to name at the time. The snow kept falling outside while we talked, and I let that recognition settle without trying to fix it or rewrite it. Some truths do not ask for anything beyond being acknowledged.

Today I let the day close in, watched the light change through the windows, and spent more time than usual thinking about how in the hell I made it this far. Forty-seven is coming whether I acknowledge it or not, and the strange truth is that I have no interest in slowing down, no instinct to ease off the throttle. If anything, the opposite. I think that refusal—to coast, to soften, to disappear quietly into some acceptable version of aging—is what keeps me upright.

I think that is what keeps me young—not optimism exactly, but the refusal to let life become too predictable. Lately I have been missing the sheer uncertainty of my childhood and early adult years, the way anything could happen anywhere at any time, and often did, whether I was ready or not. I miss my origin in that way—not the town that raised me, but the wider geography of belonging, the places my mother's side of the family once moved through as if the land itself knew our names.

Both the Adirondacks and Western New York keep coming back to me, not as nostalgia exactly, but as unfinished business, places I have not stood in for far too long. Time keeps slipping forward, and I keep realizing there are pieces of myself still waiting back there. I suppose I should go see it again—if only to remind myself where that restlessness first learned how to breathe.