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.

How I Understand Love Now

August 2, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

I have crossed between Vermont and New York enough times that the state line no longer feels like a border. The mountains continue in both directions without acknowledging the sign. The roads change numbers, the gas stations change, and eventually New York begins behaving like I remember again, but nothing announces the exact moment when one version of home ends and another begins.

For most of my life, leaving meant something specific. It meant packed bags, a car loaded before I knew where I was going, two weeks’ notice if the adults involved were feeling unusually generous, and the quiet understanding that whatever life I had arranged was no longer mine to keep.

Leaving was rarely travel. It was removal. New York is where I came from, except for the parts of it that still feel like somewhere I am returning to. Vermont is where I built the life I chose, though sometimes I cross the state line and realize that choice did not erase what came before it.

I went to Queensbury to have sushi with Maddie. Maddie and I sat across from each other with sushi between us and continued whatever conversation we had already been having. We rarely begin conversations. We simply resume them.

Some people require a complete explanation before they can understand what I am trying to say. They need the names, dates, sequence of events, background information, emotional context, supporting documents, and, occasionally, a brief presentation with clearly labeled diagrams.

Maddie usually understands somewhere in the middle of the first sentence. Sometimes before that. There are people who listen for the part of a story they can answer. Maddie listens for the part I am still trying to understand. She knows when I am stating a fact, when I am asking a question, and when I am pretending a question is merely an observation because I have not yet decided whether I want an answer.

That kind of understanding cannot be manufactured through proximity alone. Plenty of people have spent years near one another without becoming known. Physical distance is one of the least reliable measurements in a relationship. Someone can sit beside you every day and remain unreachable. Someone else can live across state lines and still be the first person your mind reaches for when something happens

Maddie always answers the phone before I decide what to say. That is one definition of friendship.

I told her long ago that I would not call at a bad hour unless it mattered. Otherwise, I would send a text. The distinction became its own small emergency protocol between us. A text means I have something to say. A call means I need her voice before I know what the words are.

So far, I only called her at a bad time once—when Amelia announced that she wanted a divorce. She answered immediately.

There are things in life that appear small until you have lived without them. Friendships like this do not happen very often in life. Maybe once. Maybe twice. Perhaps some people are fortunate enough to have more, though I have learned not to use other people’s abundance as a measurement for my own life.

When a friendship like this happens, you know it. I have only had this level of friendship with Maddie and Makayla. I had it during my marriage to Amelia up until the time she called our marriage off.

Important things rarely announce themselves correctly while they are beginning. They arrive as ordinary conversations, shared meals, late-night telephone calls, long drives, jokes that require too much history to explain.

I used to believe love would feel dramatic enough that I could not possibly mistake it. Perhaps there would be some great revelation, a perfectly timed sentence, or a cinematic event that would later become unbearable in lesser retellings.

Reality was quieter. For most of my life, I believed I would know love by who stayed.

That belief made sense for the life I had lived. People left often enough that staying seemed like the rarest possible act. My father sent me away. Schools sent me elsewhere. Camp ended for me long ago. Friends disappeared into lives that did not include me. Entire communities became memories. Mom died. My marriage ended.

People can love us and leave. People can fail us and still have loved us. Some relationships belong to a season, a place, a job, a particular version of ourselves, or the brief period when two lives happen to travel beside each other before the road changes. Their endings do not retroactively make them false.

Sometimes it is the person who knows exactly which details matter, and why they matter, without requiring an explanation. It is the person who does not treat your history as an administrative inconvenience. It is the person who recognizes you in the present tense, rather than continually comparing you with whichever version of you was easiest for them to understand.

I told her I might be single for a while, or perhaps for the rest of my life. We talked about the summer, the adventures still waiting for us, and her plans for the next few months, as though the future were something we could discuss without asking it to make promises. Aside from Mom and my dog, Penfold, my closest friends are the only people through whom I have ever truly understood love.

Friendship asks something more difficult. It asks me to believe that someone may want me present, through good times as well as bad. That is how I understand love now.