EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

A Typical 90's Child

July 16, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

Amelia left for my mom's house in the early morning hours. I went back to bed after she left, then woke up at my usual time of six in the morning. Apparently my sleep schedule continues to remain dependable even when everything else changes without warning.

I put my Apple 90's playlist on shuffle, connected it through Bluetooth to the wired stereo in my bedroom, turned the volume up about one-third of the way, and took a shower. The 1990s now arrive through Bluetooth. This is probably progress.

Yesterday, all I wanted was for my life to be exactly what it had been the day before.

I am losing my live-in best friend and life partner, yet I also feel strangely inspired to return to the way I used to live. Travel, spontaneity, intense friendships, open lesbian sexuality, creative risks, fewer domestic obligations. Everything. It is the kind of freedom I have not felt since I was sixteen and in love for the first time, when the future still seemed capable of going in absolutely any direction.

I did not want freedom from Amelia. I wanted Amelia. But freedom arrived with the loss, and some older, perhaps forgotten part of me recognized her.

Amelia's letter was part praise, part frustration with Vermont, and part frustration with the person I became after my career ended and the glamour of it finally returned to reality. There is a version of emergency services that looks fascinating from the outside. There are uniforms, lights, titles, photographs, impossible stories, and moments when everyone else moves backward while you move forward. People remember the successful rescue or the incident that suddenly became funny years later. They remember the person who knew what to do when something had gone terribly wrong.

Then the career ends, the uniform gets put away, and the person who did all of those things still has to live somewhere. I finally retired from the fire department permanently. I tried volunteering for a while, but it was not the same. I had seen far more than any human being should reasonably be expected to bear, and returning to a firehouse did not return me to the person I had been before I saw it.

The job ended. The calls did not. There are incidents I think about for at least five minutes every day. Five minutes does not sound like much until it belongs to the same memories, every day, for years. Amelia is the only person with whom I shared the details of those calls. She knows what happened. She knows the parts I leave out when other people ask about my career. She knows why objects that look excessive to someone else make complete sense to me.

The farm has fire extinguishers, smoke detectors, and exit signs in the hallways. So does mom's house. I am hyper-vigilant about preventing tragedy because I spent years arriving immediately after prevention failed.

Amelia once asked me, "How many extinguishers could you possibly need?"

The answer is anywhere from two to several, depending on the circumstances.

I have responded to incidents where several extinguishers were used consecutively, and that was exactly what was required to put out the fire. Fire extinguishers are designed to run empty. Fires don't always stop when we want them to.

Amelia saw too many extinguishers. I saw the calls where one was not enough.

She regarded my habits of having redundancy as a form of hoarding. That word carries its own history in my life. Mom hoarded because she could not let things go. Her house filled with objects because objects remained when people, time, and entire versions of life did not. I accumulated and installed fire equipment because I know how quickly everything can disappear.

The hardest part of losing Amelia is not simply losing my wife. I am losing the ordinary presence of my best friend. I am losing the person who already knows the story, including the stories I have never told anyone else. Friendship may remain, and I sincerely hope it does, but friendship will not be the same as hearing her move through the kitchen and knowing that my best friend is home.

Her feelings toward me changed. Mine did not. I fell in love with Amelia, married her as my best friend, and continued loving her while something changed for her that did not change for me. Until she walked into my room with the letter, I believed I was still living inside the life we had chosen together.

I told Amelia that I planned to marry only once in my life. Regardless of how it ended, that was my one shot. I did not marry because I wanted someone to fill the role of wife. I married Amelia because I loved her, because she was my best friend, and because she was the person with whom I wanted to make that promise.

And for her, I decided to take my shot. The ending does not make the choice a mistake. I meant it when I married her. I mean it now. Our relationship happened right on time, even though it ended before I was ready.

Amelia entered my life when meeting her could change its entire trajectory. She left me with experiences I never would have had without her. There are entire sections of my life that exist because she was sitting beside me.

Once, Amelia and I were driving to Texas in a blacked-out 2016 Toyota Tacoma with a thin red line and angel wings in the back window. We were somewhere in Kentucky when a state trooper pulled up alongside me and rolled down his window.

He asked my rank.

"Lieutenant specialist," I said.

"Let's race," he replied.

I looked at Amelia.

She nodded.

I looked back at the trooper.

"Well, officer, challenge accepted."

The important part of that story is Amelia's nod. She did not require an extended discussion about whether accepting a street racing challenge from a Kentucky state trooper was a responsible decision. I looked at her, she understood the question, and she nodded.

That was us.

That was our first Christmas after Amelia and I married. We traveled to San Antonio to visit my aunt. At some point on Christmas Day, my aunt asked whether I had shared the family secret with Amelia, which is a remarkably efficient way to destabilize a holiday.

So I finally told my Amelia that when I was born, the doctors had labeled me a hermaphrodite, though I was raised as a girl. That was the first and only time I ever saw Amelia genuinely upset with me for not telling her something before we married.

Without Amelia, these memories would not exist. Neither would the trips, conversations, private jokes, ridiculous decisions, and ordinary mornings that belonged specifically to the two of us. Some experiences were profound. Others were completely absurd. Most probably did not seem important enough to preserve while they were happening because we believed there would always be more of them.

The relationship ending does not erase the miles already traveled.

Lately, I have been bringing pieces of the 90's back into the house. I brought my DVDs back from Mom's house, where they had been stored in her garage for years. I set up a PlayStation 2 in the living room of the farm and added a wired stereo system to my bedroom. The entire house has acquired a 90's atmosphere again, only with the latest technology hidden inside it.

I am not trying to become sixteen again. I remember enough about being sixteen to know that repeating the entire experience would be a terrible idea. What returned was the feeling that my life could still become something I had not already planned.

Less than a week before my forty-seventh birthday, the future feels unwritten again. I did not ask for that. If the choice had been mine, Amelia would still be my wife and my life would still look exactly as it did before she handed me the letter. But that choice is no longer available. I can love the life we had and still wonder where I might go next. Both feelings are present, yet neither has done anything useful by only partially canceling the other.

Today, my neighbor Trish came over for a brief afternoon visit to wish me a happy birthday. She brought over one of her handmade cards and some stuffed shells, which I haven't had in far too long. Over the next few weeks, I intend to be extremely active and social. I will spend time with my friends, travel, write, make things, listen to music, and let my life move in directions I cannot predict yet. Probably into some abandoned building or train where I will go simply for the stories and pictures.

Yesterday, life felt like it was killing me. This morning, the house had music in it.

Amelia and I happened right on time. I still love her in some friend way. The fact that our marriage ended before I was ready does not change what it gave me.

I do not know exactly what happens next. If I am destined to be single for the rest of my life, I shall do it in the spirit of a typical 90's child—reckless, wild, and fiercely loyal.