EMILY PRATT SLATIN

About

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

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

The Weight And The Value Of Staying

December 31, 2025—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)
There are nights when I sit in the quiet and feel every unfinished sentence inside me shift like unsettled dust, and I realize how much of my life has been spent carrying things I never had the language for. Not secrets, per se, just simple truths no one ever asked to hear. I think about the people who walked away without looking back, the ones who left mid-sentence, the ones who stayed long enough to remind me what leaving looks and feels like. Some losses don't arrive all at once; they seep in slowly, the way cold finds its way into the bones in late December. You don't notice at first. You just move differently, quieter, think slower—aware of how fragile certain parts of you have become. I still hold conversations in my head with people who would never survive the weight of the real words. I apologize to myself for the years I spent pretending nothing hurt. And sometimes, in the middle of the night, when the world softens into that familiar darkness, I feel the old ache settle beside me—not hostile, not dramatic, just ever-present. A reminder. A witness. And in that moment, I understand that healing was never about forgetting; it was about learning to sit with the memory without letting it claim the whole room. I've outgrown versions of myself I swore I'd die with, and I miss them the way people miss childhood homes—painfully, privately, and yet with no desire to return. But I keep going, one quiet breath at a time, because there's still something in me that refuses to bow out early. Something steady. Something stubborn. Something mine.

Some days I move through the world with the heavy calm of someone who's seen too many endings to be startled by another one. Loss trained me early—taught me that people leave for reasons that rarely match the stories they tell, and that closure is something you build, not something you receive. I still carry the softness I had before the damage set in, but now it's layered with the kind of caution that comes from living through promises that didn't keep pace with reality. There are moments when I look out across the fields, the pines standing tall against the sky, and I feel every old version of myself gathering behind me like shadows that never quite grew tired. I don't chase them away. They earned their place. They remind me who I was when I didn't know how to stay, when running felt safer than staying. I've learned that grief doesn't announce itself—it settles gently on the shoulders, light at first, then unmistakable. But even in the worst seasons, I kept a part of myself intact, a quiet determination to live a life that didn't apologize for being mine. And now, when the wind slips through the pasture and the last hours of 2025 slip by, I feel something settle in my being—not hope, not peace, but a new kind of patience. A clarity that doesn't need permission. A soft, steady certainty that I've survived enough, lost enough, loved enough, to finally understand the weight and the value of staying.