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.

What Remains When You Stop Pretending You Can Go Back

January 17, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont

Forty years ago, my parents bought my childhood home. I say that number out loud sometimes—forty years—because it still feels strange that something can stand that long and still be treated as disposable in the end.

For most of my life, it was simply understood that one day the house would be mine. Not as a gift. Not as a prize. Just the continuation of things, as if the past grievances could be undone. The house sat there like a held breath for decades, waiting. It outlasted arguments, silence, family mythology. Then my mother died, and that future—the one that had stood quietly and intact for most of my life—was dismantled by other people in a matter of months. No warning. No acknowledgment of how long it had stood. Just the faint, unmistakable smell of smoke over scorched earth.

I keep circling back to the town that raised me, and how it eventually became the same town that refused me. When I was a kid, adults loved to warn me about leaving. They talked about the outside world the way people talk about rough water—cold, punishing, unforgiving, full of hidden currents. They said my life would be harder if I left. They said I would regret it. When I finally did leave at sixteen—after my father kicked me out for being a lesbian—it was hard. Hard in ways I did not have language for yet.

But after that first brutal stretch, something shifted. My life cracked open and moved in a direction no one had prepared me for. The suffering they promised me for leaving never really arrived. The deeper damage was always associated with staying.

In the summer of 1996, I showed up at the camp I had gone to as a kid and asked for a job. I had no plan beyond survival. They put me in the kitchen washing dishes. Steam. Noise. The dull ache of repetition where every day is the same.

A few days before the campers arrived, I went down to the lake early in the morning and sat on the dock. The water was still enough to hold a reflection. I remember looking down and seeing myself—not as a child, not as a runaway, not as a problem that needed solving—but as someone on the verge of making decisions that would hold. That moment has stayed with me. It was quiet. It was not dramatic. But it was the first time my future felt like something I could reach toward without asking permission first.

From that point on, my life moved into compression. Everything accelerated. I fell in love with a girl for the first time. I left boarding school without graduating. I went through the fire academy. I put myself through college. It felt like I was folding entire lifetimes into smaller and smaller spaces.

For years, I lived as if time itself was a limited resource that had to be used efficiently or not at all. My full-time career became the fire department, but on my days off I wrote, took photographs, or worked as a commercial electrician. There was no empty space. No waiting. Just one thing pressed tightly against the next. Time on top of time. Pressure turning everything denser.

At work, the pressure never eased. Results were expected and required. And most of the time, I delivered. That is not pride. It is just the record.

By the time I was forty, I had already retired. My father had died of natural causes. I was taking care of my mother. Later that year, I would marry and buy a farm in Vermont. By forty six, both of my parents were gone, and I was fully retired. I had reached the quiet end of things early. Most people are still running at that age—still accumulating, still planning, still assuming there will be more time. I was standing in the aftermath, trying to understand how a life built under sustained pressure learns how to come to rest without collapsing inward.

It was also when I was forty that I met Amelia on Twitter. Of all places. We spent two weeks in Maine on a road trip, moving without urgency for once. No compression. No proving. Just miles, weather, conversation, and long stretches of quiet that felt earned. I remember writing her a love letter. It was almost empty. The page held only three words.

I love you.

That was it. No defense. No elaboration. No attempt to impress. After decades of effort, complexity, and pressure, the truest thing I had to say took up almost no space at all.

Today was the day I promised Amelia that I would never speak of home as being anywhere except the farm. Not as a correction, and not as a comfort—just as a fact that finally settled into place.

The other place—the one that was supposed to hold for decades, the one that carried so much assumed permanence—does not exist anymore. It has been dismantled thoroughly enough that continuing to name it feels dishonest, like insisting on a landmark that disappeared years ago. The farm is not a replacement. It is not symbolic. It is simply what remains when the past is no longer available for return, and pretending otherwise begins to feel like self-betrayal.