EMILY PRATT SLATIN

About

Press Kit

She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

The Sun And Moon And The Feelings Of Egocentrism

Some days my mind is a crowded room. Today it was more like an empty field with a single fence post in the middle of it—something to lean against while I thought about things that probably do not matter, except that they clearly do.

I kept thinking about attention. Not wanting it. Not avoiding it. Just the weight of it. How being seen can feel less like warmth and more like exposure. How being central to someone else's world can turn into a strange kind of isolation. You do not get to step out of the light when you are expected to provide it. You do not get to be tired.

That is where the sun and the moon showed up—uninvited, as they always do. I thought about how the sun never asks to be looked at, but everything still turns toward it. I thought about how the moon survives on borrowed light and somehow gets blamed for being cold. I thought about egocentrism—not the cartoon version people throw around when they want to flatten someone—but the feelings of it. The quiet, uncomfortable awareness that sometimes being the center is not a choice. Sometimes it is just where gravity lands you.

I wondered how often I have mistaken responsibility for importance. How often others have mistaken my steadiness for endless capacity. There is a difference, and it costs something when people blur it.

At some point I noticed my jaw was tight, like I had been holding a line I forgot to release. I consciously let it go. I do that a lot—micro-rescues of myself, performed silently, with no witnesses. Old habits die hard. Even off-duty, Rescue Girl keeps checking the scene.

I thought about identity in the loosest sense—not labels, not declarations, just the lived shape of a life. How I occupy space. How I move through rooms. How much of my stillness is chosen, and how much of it is armor. I thought about the difference between being alone and being unaccompanied. They look similar from the outside, but they feel nothing alike.

There was also this smaller thought, almost embarrassingly domestic: how nice it is when the house stays exactly as I left it. No surprises. No sudden shifts. Just continuity. That felt important today, though I am not entirely sure why. Maybe because continuity is proof that not everything requires vigilance.

I did not solve anything. I did not come to a conclusion worth underlining. I just let the thoughts pass through without interrogating them, which might be the most grown-up thing I have done all day. Dark Horse does not always need to charge forward. Sometimes standing still and noticing the weight of the light is enough.

By the time the sun finally committed to the sky, I felt oddly calmer—not lighter, exactly, but more accurately weighted. Like I had recalibrated my own orbit. Still here. Still thinking. Still aware that even the moon gets blamed for tides it cannot control.

And that is fine. I am still here. That counts for something.