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.

Two Weeks In The Pines, And Everything That Was Supposed To Last

April 29, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

I never understood the concept of family—not in the way people say it, not in the way they seem to experience family like it's something automatic, something inherited. It always sounded rehearsed to me, like a line everyone agreed to repeat whether it was true or not. I learned early that "family" was a word people used when they wanted something to be true badly enough to pretend it already was.

My parents sent me places where connection was expected—where it was structured, scheduled, and insisted upon like it could be engineered if the conditions were right.

Summer camps, where the counselors spoke in softened voices and told us we were all a "family here," as if proximity and matching T-shirts could manufacture something real. I remember watching other kids lean into it—arms slung over shoulders, secrets traded like currency—and feeling like I had missed a class everyone else had attended.

Schools that called themselves communities, where connection was graded in participation and group projects. Sit in a circle. Share something meaningful. Participate fully. Trust the process. I remember the silence that lived inside me during those moments.

Therapy rooms with soft lighting and carefully chosen words, where I was told that connection was something we could build if we tried hard enough. As if effort alone could conjure a feeling that had never been there to begin with. I watched professionals try to map something onto me that didn't match the terrain. They weren't wrong—they just weren't looking at the right landscape.

They sent me home with the worst kind of homework… Make a friend and then report back during my next appointment. I had one friend growing up. For me that was enough.

Moms house was supposed to feel like home. My bedroom was supposed to feel like mine. Weekends that were supposed to feel different from weekdays. They all had the same isolating quiet in them.

I kept waiting for the moment people described—the one where something clicks, where you feel held in a way that doesn't require explanation. It never came. Not then. Not in those places. Not with the people who were supposed to define it for me.

I was invited to slumber parties at the house next door to Mom's. It was grade six, and I remember having to slip out the back door to get there—quietly, like I was doing something that needed to stay small. Mom said it was okay as long as my father didn't know; I couldn't ask permission in his presence, so it became something understood without being spoken.

For a while, it worked. And then, eventually, it didn't. He caught on. One night, while we were all getting ready for bed, he came next door and stood in the doorway and announced that I was a boy, as if it were something that needed correcting in real time.

No one believed him—not my friends, not their parents, not even me. He kept going, insisted on it, told them I had been born with a penis, like that would settle it. But my friends already knew me the way I knew myself. It had never been a secret to them. And it had never mattered. To everyone, I was still a girl.

All I ever wanted was acceptance, even if the full understanding was out of reach. What I got instead was observation. In my life, I typically only had one friend, and this person was the center of my world. I became very good at watching how other people did it—how they leaned, how they softened, how they stayed. I thought that maybe could replicate it well enough to pass. I knew the shape of connection long before I ever felt anything close to it.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped assuming it was something I was missing. It wasn't that I was broken. It was that the system I was placed into didn't produce what it promised. That's a different kind of clarity.

Growing up, I had one best friend, and it felt like different eras of my life were marked by who was holding that role. Not a group, not a community—just one person at a time. When one left, another would eventually take their place, but it never felt like expansion. It felt like a handoff. It was almost as if they were passing a torch of responsibility with me, quietly, without ever naming it.

There was an unspoken understanding in it, even if no one ever said it out loud. I didn't spread myself across people. Everything I had—attention, loyalty, presence—went in one direction. Focused. Complete. And maybe that was too much for most people, or maybe it was just different from what they expected friendship to be.

And then, eventually, they were gone in the way people are gone long before they actually leave. Another name. Another era. Another person stepping into a space that had never really been designed to hold more than one at a time.

I don't think they realized what they were carrying when they were close to me. Not fully. It wasn't just friendship—it was continuity. It was stability in a system that didn't offer much of it anywhere else. And when it shifted, I didn't just lose a person. I lost the structure that had formed around them.

I learned to anticipate the ending while it was still beginning. I learned to hold things a little more quietly. To watch more than I spoke. To recognize the early signs that something was already in motion, even if no one had acknowledged it yet. It didn't make it hurt less, it just allowed it to make sense sooner.

People talk about having a "circle," about being surrounded, about always having someone to turn to. That was never my experience. Mine was linear. Singular. One point of connection moving forward through time, changing hands, never multiplying.

When I was a small child, Mom would take me out on our many adventures together. She had a habit of pointing out families moving through the world in groups—parents, children, all of them orbiting one another—and she would call it pack behavior, reducing family structures to something closer to animal herd mentality. I remember the way she said it, half observational, half dismissive, like she was naming a pattern rather than participating in it.

I would watch those families as we passed them, trying to understand what she meant, trying to see what she saw, and wondering if what looked like closeness from the outside was just instinct dressed up as something more deliberate.

I remember being a small child and spending two weeks every summer at my grandparents' farm near Buffalo, New York. It was two weeks of family—connection by default, something I didn't have to question or construct. There were endless pine forests stretching out as far as I was allowed to wander, and for a while, that felt like something close to belonging, or at least the shape of it. But it didn't last. I turned 16, and the structure shifted without warning. Family dynamics changed in ways no one explained, and just like that, it was gone. I didn't see most of them again for decades—some of them never again.