Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
Tag: Childhood
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This morning I woke up with that old sentence echoing in my head, the one a therapist once gave me like a cold prescription: your problem is that you’re the daughter of a broken man. I remember the way it landed, clinical and sharp, like someone had boiled my whole life down to a single…
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I am sitting on the edge of my childhood bed, the same twin bed I slept in decades ago. The house is quiet aside from the low hum of cars passing and the soft strains of Pearl Jam’s Ten album playing on my phone. I’ve got the window cracked open—just like I used to—and I…
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I sometimes think my whole life can be traced back to two places—the farm near Buffalo where I first learned how to breathe, and the steel box of a rescue truck where I learned how to survive. Both places carried me when I was weak, both scarred me in different ways, and both taught me…
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I disappeared. Not in the tidy, storybook way people want to believe—no heartfelt goodbye, no neat conclusion, no time for anyone to brace themselves. I vanished in the rawest sense. One morning I stood up, walked out, and never came back. No explanations. No apologies. Just a chair left empty and the sound of me…
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Some people are raised by fathers. I was handled like a problem to be solved, a miscalculation to be corrected. It wasn’t parenting; it was a slow, relentless campaign. I was born on July 20, 1979, in New York City. My father, Harvey L. Slatin, was sixty-four years old, with a worldview weathered in the…
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Whenever I think of the early 1990s, it hits me like a half-remembered melody from a mixtape someone made just for me—the kind you played until the tape wore thin, because it was the only thing that ever made you feel understood. That time wasn’t just a backdrop. It was a frequency I lived on. Everything felt…
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There’s something in the air today—maybe it’s the way the breeze carries the scent of warm pine and worn wood, or the low, lingering dust hanging in the air like a ghost of someone you used to know. I cracked open the bedroom window and just stood there for a moment, barefoot on the floorboards,…
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“Being a queer girl isn’t something you decide. It’s something you survive, until you get old enough to claim it.”—Emily Pratt Slatin There are days—quiet, ordinary, well-behaved days—when everything is working just as it should. But somewhere in the periphery, somewhere behind the steady cadence of utility and discipline, something far more primitive stirs: the…
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I went down to the river today because I needed to remember who I am. Not the version people expect. Not the one who always has the answer or the fuse already lit. Just me. Alone with the trees and the current and the kind of silence you can’t get when other people are around…
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The air is cool and heavy with the scent of pine. Through my open window I hear the wind whispering in the branches—a gentle hush that carries me back to the first woods I ever loved. I remember being a little girl at summer camp, sitting cross-legged by the fading campfire on the final night.…
