Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
Tag: Lesbian
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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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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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“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.…
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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…
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The stereo’s spinning again. Not a Bluetooth speaker, not some cold digital stream humming through soulless plastic—but an actual stereo. The kind with physical buttons you can punch down like you’re dialing into a memory. Indigo Girls – 1200 Curfews. Track 12. Closer to Fine. A CD I’ve owned since it came out, and one…
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Some of the most significant moments in life slip in quietly, like soft footsteps on a worn-out wooden floor — so subtle you hardly notice until they have already rewritten everything you thought you knew. Our story started, as most modern stories do, with a reply on Twitter. Some of the most significant moments in…
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I drove like hell through the night, the highway stretching endlessly before me, my headlights cutting through the darkness like a blade. The only sound was the hum of the tires on the asphalt and the music playing on my cell phone. I didn’t stop, didn’t slow down. I just kept driving, pushing forward even…
