Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
Tag: Diary
-
The solstice always comes like an alarm clock I didn’t set. This year, it hit me harder than any before. At age forty-six, I finally broke. I set my phone to erase every message the second it came in. Calls went straight to nowhere. I deleted every app that ever made me feel like I…
-
I keep circling back to this thought: tears are for the jealous heart. Maybe that sounds harsh, but I’ve seen it enough times to know it’s true. I’ve cried rivers for things that mattered—losses that cut deep, moments too heavy to carry alone. It isn’t grief, it’s envy in disguise. People weep not because they’re…
-
“There are moments in a girl’s life when the walls around her feel too tight, no matter how much space there actually is—when she has outgrown the people, the job, or the place without meaning to. It’s not about height or weight or how she looks in the mirror. It’s the quiet awareness that she…
-
Last month, I lost one of my friends from work. We had worked together on the same Tuesday night shift for well over a decade, and in that time we became more than just two people on the crew. In a career like ours, you grow accustomed to seeing loss—line-of-duty tragedies, sudden retirements, familiar faces…
-
This morning I woke up with that old sentence echoing in my head, the one a therapist once gave me like a cold prescription: your problem is that you’re the daughter of a broken man. I remember the way it landed, clinical and sharp, like someone had boiled my whole life down to a single…
-
I am sitting on the edge of my childhood bed, the same twin bed I slept in decades ago. The house is quiet aside from the low hum of cars passing and the soft strains of Pearl Jam’s Ten album playing on my phone. I’ve got the window cracked open—just like I used to—and I…
-
I sometimes think my whole life can be traced back to two places—the farm near Buffalo where I first learned how to breathe, and the steel box of a rescue truck where I learned how to survive. Both places carried me when I was weak, both scarred me in different ways, and both taught me…
-
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…
-
There are days when the silence swallows me whole, and it is not the kind of silence I once cherished—the silence of a cold Vermont night where even the pines seem to breathe in rhythm with me. This is the kind of silence that drips bitterness on the tongue, like chewing aspirin dry. It tastes…
-
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…
