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.

The People Who Stay

July 5, 2026—Los Angeles, California

Today began with an email from a distant family member whom I have never met in person, which is, in itself, such a strange little category of human connection. Family, technically. Stranger, practically. The message followed the usual format my family seems to prefer when contacting me: first, the obligatory grievance that I am not on Facebook, as though my absence from a social media platform is some grave logistical hardship placed upon them personally.

I suppose it would be easier for them if I existed in the expected places, under the expected terms, available in the expected ways. But I have never been especially good at existing where people expect me to be.

This morning, Maddie and I boarded a flight to Los Angeles, California from Albany, New York, and somewhere in the middle of that ordinary act of travel, I told her something I had been carrying around for a while.

I finally told her that she has been, hands down, the absolute best friend I have ever had in my entire life.

It felt important to say it plainly. No flourish. No hedging. No softening the statement to make it easier to receive. Just the truth, because she has earned the truth. There are things people should not have to infer forever.

I have spent so much of my life recalibrating what words like family, friendship, belonging, and home actually mean. For most of my life, family was Mom. Everyone else was more theoretical than real, appearing by bloodline, rumor, holiday card, email, or complaint about my lack of Facebook participation. Mom was the person who was there. Mom was the one who knew the actual story, the unmanageable details, the impossible conversations, and the child behind the paperwork.

On the flight I found myself thinking about summer camp. In 1991, my first year of camp, Mom told the camp director that I was different. She said my friends at home called me Dark Horse. I wish I could have photographed the director’s face during that conversation, because I can imagine exactly how the misunderstanding began.

The director assured my parents that they were accustomed to each child being different. Which, of course, is the sort of reassuring, professional thing one says when one believes the word “different” means quirky, shy, gifted, intense, independent, homesick, allergic to peanuts, fond of frogs, or unable to sit still during arts and crafts.

Mom, not being someone especially interested in letting people drift around in euphemism when precision was required, clarified the matter.

I still laugh thinking about it, not because the situation was funny in the simplistic sense, but because the scene itself must have been spectacular. There was the paperwork, which had me enrolled under a boy’s name. A name that literally nobody ever called me.

There was Mom, insisting upon the reality of her child. There was my autism diagnosis, already known and disclosed. There was my body, which did not fit the tidy assumptions suggested by the forms. And there was the director, who had likely thought she was having a conversation about individuality and suddenly found herself trying to solve a problem for which no existing form, policy, or cabin assignment had prepared her.

And yet, somehow, I fell in love with how summer camp worked.

I had a fantastic time, and I begged my parents to send me every single summer, which they did. That is the part I keep returning to today. Whatever was complicated about the circumstances, whatever was confused by the paperwork, whatever the adults did or did not understand, the truth is that I wanted to go back. I wanted those woods. I wanted that freedom. I wanted the peculiar form of trust I found there.

I was accepted as one of the girls the entire time I was at camp, and yet nobody seemed able to understand why I was socialized female yet housed in the boys cabin. That sentence contains so much of my childhood that I almost do not know what to do with it. The children seemed to understand me in the way children sometimes do, before adults teach them which categories are supposed to matter most. I belonged with the girls. That was simply the social truth. The administrative truth, however, was something else entirely, and every night it reasserted itself when I had to go back to the wrong cabin.

For years, I think I expected that camp should have given me lifelong friendships. Forever friends, shared summers, letters, reunions, stories retold with growing affection and slightly worse accuracy every passing year. Childhood has a way of convincing us that intense experiences should produce permanent relationships.

I thought the people I knew at camp were my friends, and they were, in the way children at camp are friends. But my friendships later in life have put all of this into perspective.

My friendship with Maddie, especially, has put it into perspective.

There is a difference between affection born from proximity and friendship built from choice. There is a difference between people who know the version of you available to them in childhood and people who know the woman you became, the woman you are, the woman you fought your way into being. The children at camp may have accepted me more naturally than the adults could explain, but they knew me inside the conditions of that place and that time. Maddie knows me now. Maddie has stayed. Maddie has shown up in ways that make the old definitions feel small.

That realization does not make me bitter toward camp. If anything, I think I understand it more fairly now than I ever have.

I cannot rationally blame the camp for the actions of my parents, who enrolled me under a boy’s name at a camp where I would later be remembered through the confusion of that beginning. The camp did not create the contradiction. The camp inherited it. The contradiction arrived in my duffel bag, attached to my paperwork, long before anyone there had a chance to know me. They received a child who did not fit the paperwork, a mother who was blunt enough to say what needed to be said, an autism diagnosis, a nickname like Dark Horse, and a situation for which there was probably no established protocol.

In my case, they trusted me. That trust may have been against policy. In fact, I know it was. Everyone else had attendance checks. I did not. Half the time, I was off in the woods by myself while everyone else was being counted, supervised, and folded back into the machinery of camp routine. I was the child allowed to wander.

I understand now how unusual that was. I understood it somewhat then, but children understand privilege differently. I did not experience it as liability, exception, or administrative risk. I experienced it as unbridled freedom.

The woods were freedom. Not symbolic freedom. Actual freedom. Physical freedom. Psychological freedom. The freedom to move without being watched every moment. The freedom to be quiet without being corrected. The freedom to think my own thoughts, follow my own path, and return when I was ready. There was an unspoken trust beneath it all, and because it was unspoken, it felt even more powerful. No one sat me down and told me I was trusted. They simply behaved as though I was.

That may have been one of the most important gifts anyone gave me as a child.

It was not abandonment. It was recognition. They saw that I could be alone in the woods and be fine. More than fine. Better. Regulated. Capable. Myself.

At the time, I was confused why adults believed in me, even during the periods in my childhood when I did not believe in myself.

The older I get, the more I realize that some relationships belong entirely to their time and place. They are real, but not permanent. They matter, but they do not continue. Childhood makes us think that anything meaningful should last forever, and adulthood teaches a harder, quieter truth: some things matter because they happened, not because they stayed.

Maddie is different. With her, I do not feel like a memory that has to be explained. I do not feel like paperwork contradicting a person. I do not feel like someone people almost understood. I feel known. I feel chosen. I feel met in the present tense.

Maybe that is what I was trying to understand today. Family can be assigned. Friendship cannot. One arrives through paperwork, genealogy, or coincidence. The other arrives through a thousand deliberate choices, repeated over time. This morning began with an email from someone related to me. It became a day spent beside someone who chose me anyway. Those are not the same thing, and I no longer confuse them.