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.

People Rarely Belong To A Single Era

June 26, 2026—Stamford, New York (Mom's House)

This morning I woke up and put on Take Me Home by Phil Collins. I played it on a 90's-style boombox with Bluetooth because apparently I have reached the part of midlife where convenience is acceptable only if it arrives dressed as a machine from my childhood. I turned it up to eleven, hit play.

For a few seconds, I simply stood there.

I have spent so much of my life trying to return to places that no longer existed in the form I remembered them. New York City became my origin—Stamford became home, then exile, then inheritance, then grief, then work, then something too complicated to name.

This morning, for the first time, it felt less complicated.

I finally walked myself home after thirty years away.

Last night Nora and I went to the comedy show at the Belvedere on Academy. We call it The Bel because every town worth remembering eventually shortens the name of anything it loves, resents, depends on, or refuses to say formally after dark. It is a three-day event, and I bought a pass because apparently my life now includes comedy festivals, old houses, women who ask direct questions, and the strange luxury of deciding in advance that I might want to laugh again tomorrow.

There was a time when all I wanted was to be left alone long enough to live, learn, grow, and laugh.

Last night, I laughed until I fell asleep.

That should be the whole entry, really. A simple one. I went to The Bel with Nora. I laughed. I went home. I woke up happy. The end.

Unfortunately, reality came back around and so the evening became something larger than the event itself.

A woman came up to me at The Bel and told me she had been reading my book.

I was shocked.

Not the polite, performative version of shocked where someone says they are surprised because they have been trained to perform humility in public. I mean legitimately, genuinely shocked. She had read a large portion of my book, enough to remember the actual substance of it, enough to mention the intersex birth, the freight train hopping, the friendships that often included lesbian flings, the open marriage to Amelia, and the long chain of decisions, accidents, desires, survivals, contradictions, mistakes, and absolute logistical nonsense that eventually became my life.

She said I must have lived a fascinating and exciting life. I did not know what to do with that.

I have outlived enough versions of myself to know that permanence is mostly wishful thinking. I have found that the older I become, the less interested I am in being impressive, and the more interested I am in being difficult to forget.

It is strange to hear someone summarize your life back to you as if it belongs to literature. To me, it was simply what happened. I was there. I remember the fear, the confusion, the cars, the bedrooms, the hospitals, the late nights, the dirt roads, the women, the work, the grief, the bad decisions, the good ones, and the decisions that still refuse to identify themselves correctly.

I remember the practical details, because trauma and memory both love objects. They remember upholstery, weather, smells, road noise, carpet, brake lights, handwriting, the sound of screen doors, and the particular kind of silence that comes after someone says something they can never take back.

Readers see something else.

They see a life.

For years, I thought I had been too much of everything. Too queer. Too female in the wrong rooms. Too outside the binary for people who wanted bodies to fit on paperwork. Too autistic for classrooms designed around compliance. Too intense for ordinary life.

Then I came home, and people started saying my name like it belonged here.

Some people inherit money. I inherited stories.

The funny thing about ghosts is that most of them are still alive. People in Stamford know me as Anne Slatin's daughter, Emily. They praise my mother's work during the single term she served as the mayor, letting me know how thankful they are, as if I still had a means of contacting mom to let her know.

I wish I did. Especially now.

This has been happening more and more, and I still do not know how to process it. People in town actually read my books. They speak to me about them. They know pieces of the story I once thought had to be carried alone. They tell me they respect what my family and I did for the town. They speak highly of my work, my writing, my service, my mother, my history, and the woman I became after so many people tried to interrupt her.

I may have left.

Apparently my legend stayed behind and had better social skills than I did.

That is the ironic part, and maybe also the painful part. I was gone for decades in the ways that matter. I built other lives. I became the firefighter, the paramedic, the photographer, the writer, the woman in Vermont, Amelia's wife, Maddie O'Malley's best friend, the person who learned that family can be chosen, repaired, named, lost, found, and sometimes seated across from you with a drink in her hand asking what you mean when you say kissing is personal.

Yet here in Stamford, some version of me apparently remained.

Not fully. Not accurately. No town remembers anyone perfectly. It is more like looking at yourself in the mirror at John's Tavern—scratched in places, flattering in some light, brutal in others, and always reflecting more than one thing at once. Still, people remember enough. They remember Rescue Girl. They remember my mother. They remember photographs. They remember the fire department. They remember the girl who lived in the house across from the bar. They remember the woman who lived her life out loud, came back, and wrote it all down.

I have spent most of my life documenting the world. I spent years wanting to be seen, only to discover that being seen feels very different when it finally happens. Only recently have I started noticing that I belong in the photographs too.

Maybe recognition always arrives late. Maybe it has to. Maybe the young version of me would not have known what to do with it. Maybe she would have run from it, or mistrusted it, or tried to convert it into a practical task because praise was rarely safe unless it had a job attached. The only thing she wanted was for someone to say she was real. She wanted someone to admit she was a girl. She wanted someone to say she was allowed to love women without earning the right through achievement, money, obedience, silence, or a degree her father could use as proof that she had finally become socially acceptable.

She did not need applause.

She simply needed permission to exist.

Nobody had the authority to grant that permission, but unfortunately children do not always know that. Children often believe adults own reality because adults control the doors, the doctors, the paperwork, the money, the cars, the bedrooms, the schools, the summer camps, and the punishments. I learned very young that people with authority were often wrong with spectacular confidence. That did not make them less dangerous. It only made the damage more absurd.

Now I stand in the same town, in the same house, with the same bedroom upstairs, and people tell me I mattered here.

People tell me I helped more people than I will ever give myself credit for.

I know what I did. It was all documented factually in bureaucratic style. I barely remember the calls I answered, the patients I spoke to like they were still people, the scenes I worked, or the vast majority of the decisions I made. I often carried responsibility long after everyone else thought the shift had ended, as my mind is very good at remembering what I could have done better and somewhat less interested in issuing ceremonial plaques for services rendered.

The town appears to have formed a committee in my absence.

I was not consulted.

This is probably for the best.

Last night, sitting in The Belle with Nora, I felt the impossible layering of my life again. The woman beside me belongs to the present. The bar, the street, Academy, Mom's house, and the town itself belong to several eras at once. The reader who approached me belonged to the strange third category created by books—the people who know intimate things about my life because I chose to place those things on the page, but who still do not know what I looked like standing in a room after hearing them spoken back to me.

I wonder if all writers eventually have that moment.

Someone comes up and says they read your work, and suddenly the private memory has gone out into the world and returned like a boomerang wearing someone else's voice.

I used to think writing was a way of preserving what happened. I still think that, but it is also a way of making a life available to someone who was not there. That is more unsettling than I expected. I can describe the freight trains, the girls, the birth, the body, the fire calls, the wandering, the marriage, the misadventures, the grief, and the stubborn refusal to disappear. I can write all of it down with enough precision that another person can read it and conclude that I lived a fascinating life.

But I am still the person who woke up this morning and needed a song to tell me where I was.

So I put on Take Me Home by Phil Collins.

The boombox looked slightly ridiculous sitting there with its modern Bluetooth hiding inside a body designed to resemble the machines of my youth. That felt appropriate. Some parts of me belong to the 1980's, some to the 1990's, some to emergency services, some to freight trains, some to women I loved briefly, some to whatever version of myself survived long enough to stand in this house and realize that the trip home had taken almost the entire shape of my adult life. People rarely belong to a single era.

I do not think home is only a place.

I think home is the moment when the person you became finally stops apologizing to the person you were.

For years, I thought coming home would mean returning to something. A street. A house. A room. A name. A picture perfect childhood before the illusion was destroyed. A version of my mother before age and illness, a version of my father before I understood fear, a version of myself before exile taught me to move through the world like every room might eventually ask me to leave.

Home was waiting inside the life I kept living. It was in the stained clothes I refused to throw away because they had been with me when something happened. It was in the marks on my skin that I never removed because they belonged to work, misadventure, survival, and the long practical history of being alive in a body other people once thought they had the right to correct. It was in the queerness I never hid, even when doctors, therapists, family, and society suggested silence would be safer, easier, cleaner, and more convenient for everyone except the person who would have had to disappear.

It was in the books.

It was in The Belle.

It was in Nora sitting with me in the present tense while the whole town kept pressing its old thumbprints through the walls of the evening.

After everything, after all the exits, all the misnaming, all the humiliations, all the rooms where adults discussed my body as though I was not the one living in it, all the nights in cars, all the calls, all the grief, all the ways I tried to make myself useful enough to be allowed to stay somewhere, I woke up this morning in Mom's house and realized my life is incredible.

Not perfect.

Not simple.

Not clean enough for people who prefer their memoirs pre-sanitized and their women easy to summarize.

Incredible.

I stood there in my childhood bedroom listening to the music. The house seems less haunted than it used to. The morning light came in like it used to on Christmas mornings. Somewhere outside, Stamford continued being itself with no apparent concern for the fact that I was having a revelation in a room that continues to nurture the little girl who once lived here.

Reality has always had a better sense of humor than it deserves. I thought I had come back to take care of Mom's house.

I did not understand that the house, the town, the books, the music, the old friendships, the new ones, the women, the laughter, and the stories people still carried had all been waiting to take care of some part of me too.

I may have left.

But not all of me did.

Some part of me stayed in Stamford, probably unsupervised, leaning against a wall somewhere, waiting for the rest of me to catch up.

This morning, with Phil Collins playing too loudly on a fake old boombox and the whole room humming with time, I finally did.

I walked myself home.