The Shape Of Permanence

October 7, 2025—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

This morning the light came through my bedroom window in that soft way it does in October—angled, quiet, almost apologetic for waking me. The house was still, the kind of stillness that hums beneath silence, like the world is holding its breath before frost takes the fields.

I've been spending my days reworking my website, writing raw HTML and PHP like it's 1997 again. Line by line. Tag by tag. There's something honest in that—code you can touch. Not drag-and-drop, not a prepackaged "experience." I've had my fill of tools that promise simplicity and sell dependency. I don't want convenience; I want permanence. I want words that outlive every service that will fold, every platform that pretends permanence until the next quarterly report says otherwise.

It's funny. In some ways, I've gone backward. But backward feels forward to me. Back to when life moved slow enough for you to fix what broke. When the fix itself was the point. Maybe it's nostalgia, but I think it's deeper than that.

I keep thinking about those years when I had nothing—young, broke, and wide-eyed. I can't relate to people who inherit everything and understand nothing. The ones who've never known a single-digit bank balance, never had to choose between gas and groceries, never packed their whole life into a rusted-out '91 Honda with one headlight working and a cassette deck that needed a pen jammed in to rewind.

There's a kind of life-based education in scraping by that no degree, no inheritance, can buy. It carves you down to something real. I wouldn't trade it. Not for comfort. Not for ease.

Dinner tonight was at Texas Roadhouse with Luke and Maddie. Too many rolls, not enough napkins, the usual chaos. They asked what life was like when I was young, and I laughed before answering.

The 1980's were rough around the edges but communal—people worked hard, laughed harder, and even in the mess of it all, there was belonging. But the 90's… those were the years that breathed. We were standing on the edge of everything changing and didn't know it yet. The internet was still a place we went, not a place we lived.

I told them about summer nights around campfires that burned long past midnight, about dirt roads with no destination and mixtapes made from songs stolen off the radio. That was freedom before algorithms learned our habits. Somewhere in that same decade, I stumbled into something that looked a lot like love. I didn't tell them that part. Some stories are better undeveloped—negatives that never needed light.

After dinner, we drove to the Aviation Mall in Queensbury. That place has been part of my orbit for decades. I used to stop there heading down I-87—grab a burger at Friendly's, or coffee at Ambrosia Diner. The interstate feels less like a highway and more like an old friend that still remembers every mile we shared.

Inside the mall, Luke and Maddie found a photo booth tucked near the food court. They'd never used one before, which made me feel older than I wanted to admit. When I was their age, every mall had one. We'd pile in with friends, make faces, laugh too loud, and the final frame was always blurred because someone moved mid-giggle.

So we did it. The three of us crammed into that tiny booth—the curtain half-closed, lights flashing, Luke wedged sideways trying to fit. For thirty seconds, it could've been 1994 again.

When the photos slid out—warm, smelling faintly of chemicals—I held them in my hands and felt something I hadn't in a long time. Proof that even as everything changes, some pieces of the past can still be borrowed for a minute.

This is friendship as I remember it to be. And maybe that's all permanence ever really is.

Copyright © 1998-2025 Emily Pratt Slatin. All Rights Reserved.

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