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.

We Were Still Analog Enough For Anticipation To Matter

May 14, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

I kept thinking about Alice in Chains today. There are songs that entertain you, songs that accompany you, and songs that wait quietly for decades until you are old enough to understand what they were saying all along. Nutshell is one of those songs.

I have been thinking about the idea of misprinted lies, and how much of my life was spent following instructions that looked official because they had been printed by people with authority.

The lies did not arrive looking like lies. They arrived with letterhead, parental expectations, college admissions packets, family systems, shared holidays, old friendships, long car rides, and promises nobody ever formally made but everyone behaved as though they understood.

College was the first misprinted lie. Not education itself, because learning has never been the problem. It's just that I have always learned best outside the rooms that demanded attendance and confused it with comprehension. The lie was that college would be the only acceptable path to success, the approved pathway, the place where my father's expectations and my actual life might somehow line up if I simply performed correctly enough.

My father treated college like destiny, as if legitimacy had to pass through an institution before it could be considered real. He often held my inheritance over my head, stating that if I failed or dropped out of college, he would give my inheritance to someone else.

My mother was far more reasonable, almost suspiciously so by comparison. Her standard was simple: finish high school, and do something with your life. She did not need the whole thing dressed up in ivy, diplomas, and whatever professional fantasy my father had mistaken for care.

My father did not simply want me to attend college. He wanted college to certify the version of me he had already invented.

At Marshall University in 1998, I met Gerry in my dormitory. I remember him with that strange precision certain college memories retain, not because they were dramatic, but because they were ordinary in a way I miss.

My father had forbidden me from owning a television set while I was in college, which in hindsight says less about television than it does about his inability to distinguish discipline from control.

It was never about the television. It was about denying me access to something considered normal, something social, something that allowed other people to gather without explanation. So I would spend time in Gerry's dorm room, because he had what I did not, and because friendship in the late 1990s often formed around rooms, music videos, borrowed snacks, and the simple human need to be near another person without having to justify it.

On Sunday afternoons, Gerry and I would walk to Taco Bell because it was the only restaurant we knew for certain would still be open on Sundays in Huntington, West Virginia. College towns always felt strangely abandoned on Sundays back then—streets quieter than usual, fluorescent lights humming behind locked doors, entire blocks looking like they were recovering from the night before. Taco Bell remained, lit up like some absurd little sanctuary for broke college students trying to stretch the weekend a few hours longer before Monday arrived and started making demands again.

I had written an essay for English class about the talking trash cans there—the ones that politely said "Thank you" every time someone pushed open the deposit door. I remember finding the entire concept unnecessary in the specific way certain inventions only exist because nobody involved stopped long enough to ask whether they should.

Still, the existence of a talking trash can immediately created a more important question: what would happen if someone opened it repeatedly without actually throwing anything away? Naturally, this required experimentation. I discovered fairly quickly that after enough openings, the trash can entered a kind of three-minute silent timeout, refusing to acknowledge further interaction no matter how many times the door was pushed.

Apparently the engineer responsible for designing it had already anticipated the existence of someone exactly like me.

One afternoon downtown, someone had apparently shit themselves so catastrophically that rather than dispose of the underwear, they had hung it from a parking meter like some kind of municipal warning flag. Someone else had responded by taping two quarters to the outside of the meter alongside a handwritten note apologizing for not having the guts to remove the underwear. There was a quarter-circle arrow pointing upward toward the evidence. I remember telling Gerry that this was the one time I truly regretted leaving my camera behind in my dorm room.

I went back the following day hoping it might still be there so I could finally photograph it properly, only to discover two men in Tyvek suits and yellow hard hats scrubbing the parking meter with long-handled car wash brushes and a bucket like they were decontaminating the aftermath of a small biological incident.

The city had placed orange traffic cones in all directions twenty five feet around the meter and strung up caution tape as though the entire downtown block had briefly become an environmental hazard zone. I remember standing there looking at the whole scene and thinking, fuck, I missed my opportunity.

I wrote the essay about the trash can for English class, and apparently had shown enough effort and adherence to expectations that I had earned a B+. It felt meaningless to me because I felt like the work was far beneath my ability and I was quickly becoming disenchanted with paying for what was supposed to be higher education. Submitting a piece about the shit filled underpants downtown would have certainly gotten me an F, but it would have been worth it.

I remember sharing my sandwich with Gerry so I could stay in his room and wait for the premiere of Thank U by Alanis Morissette on MTV's Total Request Live. I had a Math professor who was determined to enforce attendance despite the fact that actually passing her class was now, ironically mathematically impossible. She had gone so far as to send my faculty advisor to my door to try and force me to comply.

Half of a meat lovers sandwich was enough to allow me to escape the situation entirely. It was October 12, 1998. That detail has stayed with me for years because it contains the whole era inside it. A sandwich as currency. A dorm room as temporary refuge. MTV as an event, not background noise. Two young people sitting near a television, waiting for something to happen at an assigned time because the world had not yet become endlessly available on demand. There was an innocence to that, even if my life around it was already complicated. We were still analog enough for anticipation to matter.

The professor then decided to double down on her efforts to get me into her classroom to face disciplinary action in front of the entire class. Gerry and I decided that we were going to see if we could make it to the local mall by taking the city bus, as neither of us had access to a car. Dad had forced me to sell the car he gave me at sixteen when he kicked me out of the house. Mom used it to drop me off at college. It sat with a for sale sign on my parents lawn long enough for her to pick me up from college the following year before someone eventually bought it.

We were not aware of it at the time, but the bus service stopped for the day thirty minutes after the bus dropped us off at the mall, so the bus that was waiting behind the bus we had just exited was the only bus back to campus. Gerry and I ended up hitchhiking back to campus. What an amazing time we shared together.

On Halloween during my first year at Marshall, Gerry and I decided that since absolutely nobody seemed to be doing anything on campus, we should attempt to manufacture the stereotypical college experience ourselves by throwing toilet paper into one of the trees on the quad.

We walked across the street to 7-Eleven and bought the last roll of toilet paper they had left, then crossed back over to campus where I unraveled the first few feet and threw the roll upward into the tree. Unfortunately the roll immediately wedged itself into a fork in the trunk about halfway up. There it remained for months afterward, surviving rain, wind, and eventually winter itself. By springtime the college was prevented from removing it because a bird had somehow built a nest inside the center of the roll.

I did not know then that so many friendships would later become visible only in retrospect, like abandoned roads you can still trace through the woods if the light is right. At the time, Gerry was simply my friend. And during our college years, we would be seen together. Gerry took me to the clubs on the weekend. We volunteered for MTV day at Marshall and that evening met Garbage.

Years later, Angie and I decided to drive out to Ohio to visit Gerry and his boyfriend. I remember accepting the situation as it unfolded because that is what I do when I am trying to preserve a relationship. When we arrived, Gerry decided at the last minute that we could not spend the night at his place. His decision was final.

Angie and I accepted it. We understood that like me he was autistic, that he had never met Angie before, that hosting people can become too much. That boundary does not automatically become cruelty simply because it inconveniences someone else.

So we simply booked a hotel. We took him to the science museum. We went to lunch. The next day I stayed at his house all day while we caught up on all the ways life had changed, while Angie went shopping with his boyfriend. It was not perfect, but it worked well enough because everyone adjusted, and I still believed adjustment was one of the ways people proved they cared.

A little over a year later, Angie and I made plans to visit Gerry and his boyfriend, who by then had become his husband. We called him. We confirmed the plan. He agreed that we could absolutely spend the night at his house this time.

Angie and I told him we were leaving our house and gave him a window for when we expected to arrive. That should have been enough information for any reasonable interpretation of the situation. It was not vague. It was not implied. It was spoken out loud and confirmed between people who knew each other and had a history.

When we arrived, all the lights in the house were off. Nobody answered the door. Nobody answered the phone. Nobody was at the house. We waited outside for a little over two hours, before we got back on the interstate and drove four miles away to the nearest highway rest area and spent the night in the car because there were no hotel rooms available. That became the kind of memory forever attached to the friendship. A dark house. A phone not being answered. A rest area.

The knowledge that you traveled across several states to visit someone who had agreed to receive you, only to discover that the agreement had apparently evaporated without notifying anyone.

The excuse came later, of course. It always does. He claimed that I had not been clear about when we were coming, despite the fact that we had literally called him and told him we were on our way.

There are few things more disorienting than having someone rewrite a reality you participated in clearly enough to remember the sequence. It is not just that the excuse is wrong. It is that it asks you to doubt your own accuracy for the sake of someone else's comfort. I have spent too much of my life being asked to participate in that transaction.

Still, we tried. He took us to meet his husband's family, and Angie and I immediately bonded with them. We arrived in good faith, with warmth, curiosity, and the willingness to meet people where they were. Then, out of nowhere, Gerry came over and told us that we needed to go because his family was private hard working blue collar people with limited free time, and they only allowed two hours of outsiders.

Two hours of outsider time.

There are phrases that collapse under their own absurdity the instant they leave someone's mouth. That was one of them. It reduced the entire interaction to an unwritten social policy we had not been told existed until the timer had already expired. It was not that the family needed privacy. Families do. It was not that boundaries are wrong, so much as it was the procedural nature of it. It was the sudden reclassification of us as outsiders after we had just been allowed enough warmth to forget that we were temporary. That is what hurt. Not the boundary itself, but the timing of the truth.

After that, Gerry became more distant. Not all at once, because most endings in my life do not arrive with the decency of a visible fracture. They thin. They lose frequency. They become harder to reach without anyone acknowledging what is actually happening. Silence becomes the delivery system. Eventually, the relationship stops existing in the present tense and survives only as a set of memories: the dorm, the years of college, the decades that followed, the dark house, the rest area, the two-hour limit, and then nothing.

That is how most of my failed relationships have ended. Silence.

I have been thinking about Makayla too, because some relationships are not easy to classify after they disappear. From her perspective I was likely the longest friendship she ever had, if friendship is the right word for a child I helped raise, watched grow, took on vacations, and carried inside the daily structure of my life for more than two decades.

I started dating Angie in 2002, when Makayla was just two years old. Angie and I were engaged for a long time. I was friends with Makayla's mother. I was considered part of the family.

Makayla used to visit the farm here in Vermont, even in the years after Angie and I broke up. She was a core part of my life for many years. Vacations. Family gatherings. Inside jokes. The ordinary details that accumulate when you have known and been a part of someones life since practically the beginning. It is strange to help raise someone and then reach a point where the relationship has no current form. It makes memory feel almost illegal, as if you are holding onto something that no longer belongs to you because the social system reassigned custody of the past.

When Angie and I broke up in 2020, her family followed her. In some ways, I respect that. My own family might have done the same if I had been able to maintain a friendship with a former romantic partner. Families often close ranks because that is what families are trained to do. They are not always asking who was right, or who was wrong, or what history existed before the breakup. They protect the people they recognize as part of their structure. I understand the mechanics. Understanding them does not make the loss feel smaller.

I stopped talking to Makayla in the summer of 2025 after our trip to Atlanta and Nashville. I met her when she was two. I stopped talking to her when she was an adult. Between those two facts exists a span of years large enough to hold vacations, birthdays, family systems, photographs, stories, and an entire version of my life that no longer has a place to stand.

The lie was not that people loved me. Some of them did. The lie was that shared history guarantees continuity. History can become decorative if the present stops maintaining it. Longevity can fool you into thinking something is permanent when it is actually conditional. A person can be in your life for twenty-four years and still become unreachable once the social conditions that held the relationship in place have changed.

I do not want to turn any of these people into villains. That would be too easy, and it would also be inaccurate. Gerry had his limits. Angie's family had theirs. Makayla had her own adulthood to enter, and maybe her own version of the story that has nothing to do with mine. People are rarely as simple as the damage they leave behind. Most of them are just operating from internal rules they never bother to disclose until you have already planned the trip, packed the bag, and arrived at the dark house.

The older I get, the more I understand that I did not chase lies because I was foolish. I was not weak for believing them. I was young. I was loyal. I was operating from corrupted source material and doing the best I could with the information repeatedly presented to me.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes from realizing how much of your life was built around bad information. Not bad in the sense that everything was false, but bad in the sense that the underlying assumptions were misaligned from the beginning.

A single wrong premise can alter decades. My father believed college would prove something. I believed friendship would endure if I kept showing up. I believed family meant more than affiliation by romance or blood. I believed silence was temporary, that it would eventually be broken by someone who cared enough to account for it.

I played Nutshell again and let the song move through the room without trying to make it carry more than it already does. Some songs are not answers. They are instruments. They measure the distance between what you thought your life was, and what it actually became. Today, that distance felt both enormous and survivable.

I think the misprinted lies are no longer instructions now. They are artifacts. College as salvation. Friendship as guaranteed continuity. Family as unconditional structure. Silence as something other than an ending. I can hold them up, look them over, and see the flaws in the print without needing to live inside them anymore. That may be the closest thing to peace I can reasonably expect. Not forgiveness, and not closure. Just the ability to better recognize misinformation.