I catch myself daydreaming these days. I’ll look up from my keyboard, where my hands will have gone still for seconds or minutes or an entire week in summer when I was 10, and feel the same pang under my ribs that I did then, the summer I first saw my cousin inject himself with insulin. He was so proud of the power he had to hold the entire crowd of cousins enthralled as he drew up the dosage. He giggled with glee as we all gasped, surprised that he’d chosen his stomach as this time’s injection site. We’d all had vaccinations, and we knew that shots went into upper arms, not stomachs. And I remember sitting there long after he’d run out to climb trees or jump in the lake or dig for worms or whatever else all the young cousins were doing. I sat there and was grateful that I didn’t have to break my skin multiple times every day, or learn how large a smear of blood would be sufficient for testing, or have my mother check on me in the night to see if I had miscalculated my evening balance of food and medication. I wondered if he’d been boasting when he said the needle didn’t hurt. I wondered if he worried about his little vials of insulin breaking in his travel bag.

Walking across town these days, I’ll realize with a jolt that I’ve walked a block and a half rather than back from my grandma’s house to the gazebo, carrying orange juice that he forgotten he needed near him in the night, stepping carefully over boys wrapped in sleeping bags and having flashlight wars on the gazeebo ceiling.

Or I’ll look into the mirror in the bathroom and be surprised not to see my 13-year-old face laughing back, having just marked off the two full minutes of tooth-brushing his dentist required. He hated it that his mother had enlisted us all to mark off the time with him as we brushed. How embarrassing to have cousins check up on you. Rather like having them ask if you’d washed your hands. And yet there we all were, brushing and laughing and planning our next swimming expedition to the lagoon.

Getting ready for work in the morning, I’ll put down the brush that’s been hovering inches above the vanity, inches above the arm of hospital room’s chair, inches from the sheet that covers his burns. Blinking, I’ll remind myself that I’m not there, that I haven’t seen this, that I don’t know what it looks like, what it sounds like. I’ve never seen deep burns. I’ve never heard a ventilator (at least, not while I was awake to understand what I was hearing). I don’t even know if there is a sheet. All I know is what comes to me in the daily email updates. All I wonder is how anyone can endure this.