Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
Tag: Diary
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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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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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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…
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In the fall of 1998, I left New York and dropped straight into the Bible Belt. Rural West Virginia. A small college town where the air on Sunday morning was thick with hymns and everyone’s front porch had a flag—either American, Christian, or Confederate, depending on how honest they were. I was nineteen. A lesbian.…
