Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
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It’s 11:48 p.m., and I’m lying on a mattress that used to belong to someone else, in a room that isn’t mine anymore, in a house I never thought I’d walk back into with an open heart. But here I am. Forty-six years old, purse on the dresser, boots by the door, and the familiar…
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It rained today on my 46th birthday. Not a long, cinematic storm—no thunder, no sky-wide crescendo, no poetic deluge to make it mean something larger. Just one of those sudden summer stutters that slips through the valley like it remembered something it meant to say, then lost interest halfway through. The air shifted like it…
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Whenever I think of the early 1990s, it hits me like a half-remembered melody from a mixtape someone made just for me—the kind you played until the tape wore thin, because it was the only thing that ever made you feel understood. That time wasn’t just a backdrop. It was a frequency I lived on. Everything felt…
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I never set out to make sense of my life. I just wanted to survive it. Somewhere between New York sirens and Vermont silence, I learned that memory doesn’t arrive like a knock at the door—it comes as weather. Sudden. Heavy. Familiar. Sometimes, it sounds like a woman’s voice saying goodbye for the last time.…
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There’s something in the air today—maybe it’s the way the breeze carries the scent of warm pine and worn wood, or the low, lingering dust hanging in the air like a ghost of someone you used to know. I cracked open the bedroom window and just stood there for a moment, barefoot on the floorboards,…
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At roughly 4:00 PM on July 11, 2025, I found myself standing in a snaking security line at Nashville International Airport. The terminal was buzzing with the usual airport impatience — hundreds of travelers inching forward, shoes in hand, eyes on the clock. As a 46-year-old woman who’s flown many times, I had no reason…
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The call came in like they always do with her—out of nowhere, with the subtlety of a lit match in a fireworks store. Makayla doesn’t preface. She doesn’t build suspense. She just kicks the door in with her voice and waits for the world to catch up. “Wanna go to Atlanta?” She said it like…
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Every human being who has ever walked this strange, spinning planet has, whether or not they admit it, dreamed of seeing themselves in third person. It’s the secret behind mirrors, behind security cameras, behind every carefully framed selfie and the unspoken popularity of drones. We all want to see ourselves living—not merely existing, but being.…
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“Being a queer girl isn’t something you decide. It’s something you survive, until you get old enough to claim it.”—Emily Pratt Slatin There are days—quiet, ordinary, well-behaved days—when everything is working just as it should. But somewhere in the periphery, somewhere behind the steady cadence of utility and discipline, something far more primitive stirs: the…
Emily Pratt Slatin
P.O. Box 1231
Middletown Springs, VT 05757-1231
United States Of America