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.

What The Pines Kept To Themselves

April 27, 2026—Stamford, New York (Mom's House)

I learned how to stay by watching the pines—not in some poetic sense, not in a way anyone would ever write down in a clean notebook, but in the same way you learn anything that actually matters—by being there long enough to see what doesn't give. The pines never asked me what I survived. That is why I trusted them. People always want the story, the sequence, the explanation that turns damage into something they can file away. Trees do not need a narrative.

There is a difference between being tolerated and being understood. Tolerance creates space. Understanding removes the need for it. There is a moment in every life where you stop asking to be included and start deciding where you actually belong. That shift is irreversible. People will call you difficult when you stop accepting incomplete explanations. What they mean is you are no longer easy to manage.

The past does not disappear. It loses jurisdiction. What once controlled you becomes something you can observe without responding to. You don't lose your past. You lose your ability to live inside it. Time doesn't heal anything on its own. It just removes the urgency to respond. There are truths that arrive too late to fix anything, but not too late to matter. That is the strange mercy of getting older. You may not get the apology, the explanation, or the childhood you should have had, but you do get the final authority to name what happened.

People who never had to leave anything behind will never fully understand what it costs to stay gone. You don't become free all at once. You become free in the moments where you choose not to go back. You stop fearing loss when you realize how much of your life was built after it. There's a difference between being patient and delaying the inevitable. Some connections feel strong because they require effort. The real ones don't.

A childhood home is never just a house. You can own the deed, change the locks, repaint the walls, and still feel eight years old in the hallway when the light hits wrong. Some places do not haunt you because they are alive. They haunt you because some part of you still is.

I used to think survival meant making it out. Now I know that was only the most visible part. The harder work came later, when nothing was burning, no one was calling my name, and I had to learn how to live without needing disaster to prove I still had purpose. There comes a point in every woman's life when she stops asking whether the road she walked was fair, and starts asking whether it brought her somewhere honest. Fairness is a children's story adults keep repeating because it makes pain sound negotiable.

It has been my experience that most people do not lie outright; they adjust emphasis—they highlight certain facts, omit others, rearrange sequence, soften language, and over time these adjustments accumulate into something that feels coherent but is no longer accurate.

There is a moment, often brief and easy to miss, where you realize you have been participating in something you do not agree with, and what you do in that moment matters more than any justification that follows, because it determines whether you prioritize alignment or continuity. I have learned that the closure afterward is rarely given—it is constructed, often without the participation of the people or circumstances you are trying to resolve, and waiting for it to arrive externally keeps you in a holding pattern that can last indefinitely, whereas deciding where something ends, even without full understanding, returns a level of agency that cannot be negotiated away.