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.

Every Life Contains Things That Did Not Happen

August 29, 2026—Stamford, New York (Mom's House)

Nora spent the night at Mom’s last night.

This morning, we walked into Family Dollar because Nora needed cigarettes. We stopped at Family Dollar. Nora purchased her cigarettes and was asked for identification. I purchased two chocolate bars and had my identification ready just in case. We then went to Stamford Coffee on Main Street before sitting across the street from Mom’s house in Veterans Park.

Nora and I currently have an incredible friendship.

There is something peculiar about friendships that arrive, disappear, change, survive things they probably should not have survived, or become important at times when neither person could have reasonably predicted it. I have stopped trying to determine which relationships are supposed to last forever. Forever is an unreasonable amount of responsibility to assign to two people who have no idea what will happen next week.

Lately, people have been asking me whether I have let life pass me by.

I am never entirely sure what they think I was supposed to be doing instead. I never graduated high school or finished college. I never had children, and I did not marry until after I was forty. These facts are apparently supposed to suggest that important parts of life happened somewhere else while I was occupied with something less consequential. And yet I am happy.

We culturally privilege certain choices so heavily that their absence gets described as missing something, while the experiences sacrificed in order to obtain them are treated as though they never existed. Every life contains things that did not happen. I would not change mine.

I have also been thinking about the peculiar expectation that enough time eventually invalidates whatever happened before it.

I hate it when I am told that something happened a long time ago, and that I should be over it by now. Some things take a lifetime to get over—the past isn’t always as far away as we imagine it to be.

I can forgive without forgetting. I can remember without returning. I can love without remaining. I can leave without ceasing to care. I can miss someone without wanting her back. I can recognize the good in someone who caused harm without using the good to erase the harm.

Contradiction is not always hypocrisy. Sometimes it is simply evidence that a human mind contains more than one truth. Human beings become easier to understand when we stop demanding verdicts of entirely good or entirely bad.

There are people who caused tremendous harm in my life who were not entirely bad people. There are people I loved whom I would never want back. Neither observation requires me to modify the other.

Memory does not require reconciliation. We spend much of our lives trying to determine what things mean. Sometimes the more difficult wisdom is accepting that something happened without providing us a meaning proportionate to its consequences.

I have never particularly liked the suggestion that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes the reason is that somebody made a bad decision. Sometimes circumstances aligned badly. Sometimes something happened because human beings are human beings, which has historically been sufficient explanation for an astonishing amount of unnecessary trouble.

Experience teaches you which rules were written in blood, which were written by lawyers, and which were written because somebody once did something so spectacularly stupid that nobody wanted to risk a sequel.

I learned plenty of those during my career.

Human relationships have their own versions, like the girl you meet only once in your life—and spend the rest of it knowing exactly why once was enough to change everything.

I am no longer convinced that everything that changes us requires a conclusion. Most things in life seem to work that way.

Today, I had coffee with my friend Nora, and I proposed this as a topic of discussion. Life did not pass me by. I was apparently awake and ever present the entire time.

Later, Nora and I went to the Bel, where everyone sat outside around the campfire.

People kept arriving. The benches were already crowded, but every time someone new appeared, people moved closer together and somehow found room.

Nobody sat on my bench despite me moving my bag from next to me and voicing that there was open space. I noticed this much earlier than I wanted to admit.

I wanted to leave, which was inconvenient after spending an afternoon discussing the complexity of human experience.