EMILY PRATT SLATIN

About

Press Kit

She/Her/Hers Lesbian

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

What Remains

November 13, 2025—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)
There are days I think I'm held together with memory, stubbornness, and the kind of grit you only get when life has already taken too much. I grew up early—too early, honestly. I was handed responsibility long before I had the language for any of it. I learned to read faces, rooms, danger, intention. I learned to hold everything together, even when the world seemed perfectly content to stick me in the corner and tell me to smile. Emotional survival became second nature—something I did the same way other people tie their shoes, without thinking, because there was never another option.

Mom had been sick for over a year, hanging on in that strange, suspended way that makes time feel elastic and unreal. Then, suddenly, the call came, and everything I still needed to say collapsed into a single moment I didn't get to have. I stood at the foot of her bed in my fire uniform, the same one she always said made her proud in a way she never quite had words for. I lifted my hand and saluted her one last time—an act that felt like handing back something heavy I'd been carrying for decades. The sound in the room shifted then, like a door easing shut behind someone you love.

When I went back to her house afterward, the quiet felt wrong, like the air hadn't caught up to the loss yet. I climbed the stairs to my old bedroom, the one where I hid my diary under the mattress and learned how to confide in the moon through the windows. I sat on the edge of the bed and took my uniform off—this time for the last time. It didn't feel triumphant or tragic. Just final—like a chapter I'd been dragging behind me finally exhaled.

I can feel myself changing. Not in the big cinematic way—more like slow shifts beneath the surface, things turning over one at a time. I traded my F-150 for a Bronco. Same grit, less history. It was overdue. I'm done putting fire or rescue decals on my car. I'm done signaling a life that demanded more from me than it ever returned. Retiring as Lieutenant Specialist—special rescue and EMS—was something mom always saw as one of my brightest things, the part of me she showed off to other people. Now she's gone. Dad's been gone for years. And without them to witness it, I'm realizing I don't have to keep wearing the past like a badge anymore.

I gave that job every version of myself I had. It shaped me, scarred me, raised me, and nearly ended me. But it doesn't own me anymore. It's time to let that life settle into memory, the same way the dust settles in an old rail yard after the engines roll out. It's time to build something quieter, steadier, and slower.

Some mornings the fog rolls in like forgiveness that doesn't need to be earned—even the moon needs darkness to be seen. Sometimes I wonder if the stars are just the universe remembering itself out loud. And when the night closes around me, steady and unbothered, I whisper back: I'm still here with Amelia. Safe and alive, and somehow we made it through together.