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.

Where The Magic Was Patiently Waiting

May 18, 2026—Stamford, New York (Mom's House)

Amelia and I are at moms for a few days. There are places I visit, and then there is moms house. Visiting implies movement, intention, luggage, plans, and the polite fiction that I am passing through. Moms house is different. I do not pass through it so much as re-enter it. Sometimes when I am here, I feel less like I have come back as an adult and more like I have stepped into a room where sixteen-year-old me has been waiting patiently all this time, not angry, exactly, but not relieved either. Just waiting.

This morning, Amelia brought up an old childhood friend of mine, one of the first girls I met in third grade after we moved to Stamford. I had not been thinking about her in any organized way, but memory has never needed my permission. One name, one reference, one sentence over coffee, and suddenly I was back there—back in that strange middle period of childhood when I was always being introduced to another life before the last one had finished making sense.

She and I were friends until my father pulled me out of school and enrolled me at Cooperstown for grade eight, before sending me to boarding school in ninth grade. At the time, I do not think I understood what was happening to me as disruption. I understood it as life because children are forced to accept whatever shape life takes around them. But now, looking back, I can see how often my father reset my social world.

Every few years, there was another scene, another group, another set of rules I had not been present to learn, another place where everyone else already belonged to each other before I arrived.

All of this became harder as I got older. When children are young, the social world still has soft edges. Friendships form quickly, loyalties are fierce, and everyone is still partially unfinished. But later, the circles harden. By adolescence, people already have their own private histories, shared jokes, betrayals, alliances, crushes, grudges, and tiny mythologies. To enter a social scene late is not the same thing as joining one.

I became very good at adaptation, which is not the same thing as belonging. I am not sure I ever learned to remain. And as such, childhood friendships have always meant something different to me. I have never understood them as disposable. A friend from childhood, as far as I am concerned, is a friend for life until factors determine otherwise. Time alone is not one of those factors. Distance is not one of those factors. Silence is not automatically one of those factors. I think this is one of those beliefs I carried with me long after the world tried to make me feel foolish for carrying it.

Most people grow up and reduce friendship into convenience, location, schedules, and adult maintenance. I never really did. To me, a childhood friend is someone who knew me before I had language for most of what I was surviving. That kind of bond does not simply expire because decades pass.

Going back to my hometown has always reminded me of summer camp in a strange way. Camp friendships had their own rules. You could be best friends with someone for years, then live entire lives apart, then somehow come back into each other's orbit and pick up the conversation as though it had only been interrupted by dinner. Childhood hometown friendships can feel the same way, except there is often more ache inside them. At camp, everyone expects the world to be temporary. At home, the temporary nature of things feels more like a betrayal.

Sometimes when I am back here, it feels like I am living inside some warped version of It's a Wonderful Life, where there is always the potential to be known if given enough time, except the time never happened. I have known these people since early childhood, yet many of them only know my name.

They did not see the ambulances, the firehouses, the late-night drives home after impossible calls, or the version of me those years created. They did not witness my breakups, my struggles with alcoholism after retirement, the women I loved, the ones I lost, or the life I somehow managed to build despite the odds multiplying around me for years like weeds growing through cracked pavement. To most of them, I remained suspended somewhere near adolescence, preserved as an earlier draft of myself while entire lifetimes unfolded elsewhere beyond the borders of this town.

Moms house became the center point of my childhood, and I think that is why it hurts so badly when anyone suggests I change it, or let it go. They are not talking about a house, even if they think they are. They are talking about the one fixed point in a childhood that was otherwise repeatedly interrupted. They are talking about the place where I spent the best times of my young years with my best friend, Matt. The place where I lost my virginity to another girl. The place where I dealt with every heartbreak, and every late-night cry with Penfold—all of it happened here, or returned here, or was carried upstairs afterward and written about within the walls of my bedroom.

When people casually suggest moving on from a place like this, they do not understand that some places are not possessions. They are witnesses.

When I was a child, it felt like I raised myself. My parents felt more like roommates to me. Dad's rules were simple from the beginning, but above all else, my career had to come before a relationship, and this included dating. I would be allowed to date when I was older. Mom let me do whatever I wanted, so long as I kept my grades up and didn't bother anyone.

I would get up, make my own breakfast, get dressed, and go to school by myself, and it felt less like childhood than going to work. I would come home, do my homework, find something to do, and Penfold would be involved in it somehow. Then I would go upstairs to my room and go to bed with him. That was the daily rhythm. On the weekends, Matt would occasionally come over to my house after school Friday and end up spending the night at moms house. On a handful of occasions, I would hitchhike out to Harpersfield and meet up with him at the general store on the corner of his road and walk back to his parents house.

There were adults in my house, but the structure of my life felt like something I maintained on my own. I do not remember being guided so much as managing myself. Childhood, for me, had a procedural quality. Wake up. Eat. Dress. Leave. Return. Complete tasks. Entertain myself. Make sure Penfold has everything he needs. Retreat upstairs. Sleep beside the dog.

Penfold was threaded through everything. He was not merely my dog. He was the only one in the house whose loyalty never required interpretation.

I was the weird kid who sort of lived upstairs in my bedroom like it was an apartment. My room was not merely where I slept, it was where I existed. It was where I wrote, cried, listened to music, read books I was not sure anyone else around me would understand, built theories about the world, and became myself in private.

On my bed was always my copy of Cassell's Encyclopedia of Queer Symbol and Spirit. That book mattered to me because I was not only trying to understand sexuality or identity. I was trying to understand lineage, symbol, meaning, language, and where someone like me might fit in a world that seemed determined to misread me.

I found culture where I could. I was somehow on a first-name basis with Davy Rothbart and Sarah Locke from Found! Magazine, which I discovered online through old websites hosted at Geocities.
I was mentioned as an "all-star finder" in one of their books. This made perfect sense to me then and still does now. I have always been drawn to the evidence people leave behind—the notes, scraps, fragments, photographs, lists, and strange little abandoned signals that prove a life was happening even when no one else seemed to be paying attention.

One day, when my father got drunk, he threw those things out, along with my rainbow flag. Books, objects, my diaries and letters from friends, small proof of selfhood—gone because he decided they should be gone. What he never found was my hardcover copy of Richard Bach's Illusions. That survived. I've since replaced the books.

The albums of my childhood were Sheryl Crow's The Globe Sessions, Pearl Jam's Ten, R.E.M.'s Out of Time, Duran Duran's Wedding Album, Counting Crows' August and Everything After, the Indigo Girls, especially 1200 Curfews, and Nirvana.

Matt and I listened to Nirvana and Pearl Jam's Ten all the time. These were not just albums. They were what I had when adults were not speaking the language I needed. Throughout my childhood I was often lonely in a way that made ordinary conversation feel useless. The music understood alienation, longing, anger, memory, devotion, desire, and the particular ache my generation felt of being young and already tired.

Matt was my first best friend. Over the years, we ended up living at each of our parents places at one time or another. I got kicked out of moms by my late father, but if Matt was around, I was tolerated more because my father would have "father/son" time with my best friend instead of me.

It did not make much sense to me at the time. I only understood the emotional mechanics of it. If Matt was there, the atmosphere shifted. My father seemed easier, more engaged, more able to inhabit a role he understood. I became more acceptable by association. That is a confusing thing for a child to absorb—that someone else's presence can make your own existence more tolerable to a parent.

One year, the Super Bowl was on television, and my father and Matt sat in the living room with a bottle of vodka and a half gallon of orange juice and watched the game and drank together.

They started with shots and already my father was saying misogynistic things about me and mom. I went upstairs to my room with Penfold when he looked up at me with those big brown eyes that whispered words of love and loyalty in the shape of the day. The two of us spent the evening hiding in my bedroom with Pearl Jam's Ten playing on CD while I wrote in my notebook. Downstairs was football, alcohol, male bonding, and the version of fatherhood my father seemed able to perform with someone else.

I think about that division often now. Downstairs was the visible world, the socially approved world, the world people could name. Upstairs was the actual world, at least for me. Upstairs was where I kept myself alive in the ways that mattered. It was where I learned the language of my own interior. It was where I discovered that writing could hold things other people could not, or would not hold. It was where I learned that a dog could look at you and say more with his eyes than most humans could manage with a full vocabulary. It was where I learned to trust music, notebooks, books, and animals as forms of continuity.

Reconnecting with that childhood friend hurt so much, and why thinking about her today opened this whole thing inside me again. When Amelia and I got married, she saw my name in the paper and somehow managed to call my mom, who still remembered her and gave her my number.

We reconnected immediately. There was no awkwardness, no cautious adult distance, no polite performance of "catching up" while secretly assessing whether the past still mattered. It mattered. It had always mattered.

We spent part of a summer in close proximity, attending concerts, camping just the two of us, and revisiting abandoned places that used to exist from our childhood in the Catskills of New York. It felt like the old emotional laws still applied. It felt like she understood friendship the way I understood it—that time may pass, but some bonds remain dormant rather than dead.

She was apparently the one friend I had in my life at that time who still believed in the magic of friendship the way that I understood it. That is what makes this memory both beautiful and devastating. She proved that I had not invented that feeling alone. She remembered. She came looking for me. She found her way back through old channels, through my name in the paper, through my mother. And when she returned, it felt immediate, as though the friendship had simply been waiting for contact to resume.

Then came the day she told me about her abusive boyfriend. I had suspected he might have been abusive towards her after seeing parts of their relationship that summer. Of course I offered her Vermont. There was no question about it. If she needed to hide, she could come to us. It was not even remotely a problem. Childhood friendship, to me, does not stop being real when adulthood becomes inconvenient. If anything, that is when it matters most.

She stayed with him. Soon afterward, maybe two weeks later, she called us and said she needed help. Amelia and I raced to her house. I got through her door because I was able to shim the catch. She had been beaten badly and had cuts all over her body. I asked her if she wanted to go to the hospital. She said no. I asked again. I kept asking. She asked me to help her get cleaned up.

I helped her undress, and she sat in the bathtub in warm shallow water while I helped her get clean. It looked like she had been in an industrial accident—cuts, bruises, blunt force trauma, the unmistakable evidence of violence written across a body that should have been safe.

I begged and pleaded with her to come back to Vermont with us, or at the very least, to please let me take her to the hospital. I told her Vermont would be safe. I meant it. Amelia and I would have taken her home with us right then. I would have made room. I would have protected her as much as any human being can protect another. She told me she loved me and was happy that she had been able to meet Amelia, but she told us we needed to go.

One last hug followed by the two of us crying and holding hands for a few minutes is my last memory of her. I found out in the newspaper that she died soon after. No cause of death was stated.

There are losses that feel like grief, and there are losses that feel like a door closing on an entire possible life. Hers felt like both. I did not only lose the adult woman she had become. I lost the child I knew, the friend who came back, the summer we had briefly recovered, the abandoned places we revisited, the proof that someone else still believed in friendship the way I did, and the future where maybe she came to Vermont and lived.

I know I did what I could. I know she was an adult. I know refusal is refusal, even when it is heartbreaking. Sometimes even when love and loyalty are real, and the offer genuine, it is still not enough to save someone. Sometimes things happen this way because the world itself can be stronger than what two people can carry between them. The hardest part about getting old is watching pieces of your own history disappear with the people who carried them too. That is a terrible thing to know.

Amelia and I met up with Maddie during our trip to moms. Somewhere along the way, she quietly became the younger sister I would have wanted beside me throughout my childhood, the kind of best friend who would have understood the strange little world upstairs in my bedroom without needing much explanation.

The three of us had dinner together at Kashi Sushi in Queensbury, and for the first time since I have known Amelia, she actually tried sushi, trusting Maddie's recommendations without hesitation. Watching the two of them together across the table felt oddly healing in a way I cannot entirely explain, like witnessing different parts of my life learning how to belong to each other naturally.

I do not think Maddie fully realizes how much her presence has enriched both mine and Amelia's lives already. Some people arrive loudly and all at once, but others become family so gradually and sincerely that one day you suddenly realize the shape of your life would feel incomplete without them in it.

Being here at moms brings all of this back because this house is where my understanding of friendship was formed. In the strange, quiet structure of a childhood where I often felt like I was raising myself, yet still found fierce attachments that became permanent in my mind.

When someone tells me I should change this place, or let it go, I do not think they understand what they are asking. They are asking me to loosen my grip on one of the only places that held the whole record. They are asking me to behave as though childhood is something that can be boxed, edited, renovated, and made neutral. But my childhood was not neutral. It was lonely, vivid, strange, self-contained, funny in places, frightening in others, full of music, full of longing, and full of Penfold's big brown eyes always looking up at me.

In the months since mom has been gone, I have learned to forgive her. The forgiveness did not arrive simply because she died. Death alone does not automatically soften the truth of a life or erase the complicated weight people leave behind. Forgiveness came later, slowly, when I finally allowed myself to fully accept that there was absolutely nothing in this world that mattered more to my mother than the bond we shared. She prioritized my happiness in every way she knew how, even when it came at a cost to herself, to our stability, or to the structure of our lives together.

She was imperfect, deeply human, sometimes overwhelmed, sometimes afraid, and sometimes wrong, but she loved me with a ferocity that shaped my childhood in countless ways, regardless of whether I understood it at the time or not. I cannot, and likely will never be able to forgive her for carrying out my fathers wishes to have Penfold put down as revenge for me being queer.

I can finally forgive her for everything else because she was human, and because despite everything, she did the best that she could. I no longer need her to have been flawless in order for her love to have been real.

Amelia and I are staying over at moms for a few days. Amelia knows the adult version of me, the Vermont version, the version who survived long enough to build a life elsewhere. But here, regardless of legal ownership, Amelia and I have agreed that for as long as I shall live, we will call it mom's house.

Sometimes continuity is something you have to keep yourself. You keep it in a room, in a book, in a song, in an old friend's name, in a hidden object that survived, in the memory of a dog refusing to leave your side, or in the ache of someone who came back into your life just long enough to prove the magic you believed once existed was in fact real.

I still want to be upstairs when I am here. Not because I am stuck in the past, but because part of me is still there, and she deserves company.