Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
Tag: Amelia Phoenix Desertsong
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I disappeared. Not in the tidy, storybook way people want to believe—no heartfelt goodbye, no neat conclusion, no time for anyone to brace themselves. I vanished in the rawest sense. One morning I stood up, walked out, and never came back. No explanations. No apologies. Just a chair left empty and the sound of me…
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Some people are raised by fathers. I was handled like a problem to be solved, a miscalculation to be corrected. It wasn’t parenting; it was a slow, relentless campaign. I was born on July 20, 1979, in New York City. My father, Harvey L. Slatin, was sixty-four years old, with a worldview weathered in the…
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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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I’m out on the porch when the call comes through. The local tractor dealership is on the line, letting me know that my new mower deck—a long-awaited upgrade—is being assembled and will be delivered in the next couple of days. I thank them by name, because by now they answer with Hey Emily, as if…
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As far back as I can remember, my childhood was haunted by a profound sense of fragility. While other kids were preoccupied with cartoons and playground games, I was grappling with questions of life, and death. I carried a storm inside me even as a little girl—a churning cloud of existential dread that lived under…
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I spent a year in the mouth of a whale. Not literally, of course, but in a place just as dark and confining. Inside, the outside world became a muffled hum, and time lost its meaning. It was a space of suspended existence—quiet, briny, and claustrophobic—where I felt both strangely protected, and painfully trapped. In…
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I changed the ending of the story I was handed. And I didn’t do it loudly, or for attention—I did it quietly, like planting a tree I may never sit under, trusting that its shade will still offer shelter to someone, someday.”—Emily Pratt Slatin It was late, I pulled my skirt off, tossed it in…
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When I was a teenager, I discovered the roof of my parents’ house wasn’t just made of shingles and nails—it was made of silence. It was made of peace. It was the only place I could go where the rest of the world couldn’t follow, and more importantly, wouldn’t try. It started the way most…
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There are nights when I step outside into the silvered darkness of my Vermont farm, and the only thing I feel truly seen by is the moon. The world is quiet here—just the chorus of crickets and the distant hoot of an owl—but above me the moon hangs like an old friend. Its pale light…
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“Most people fall in love like rain; I fall like wreckage.”—Emily Slatin Most people fall in love like rain—soft, steady, the kind that gently soaks in over time. They ease into it, step by step, trusting that each drop will collect into something nourishing. I never learned that kind of love. I don’t fall like…
