Our Little World

by Karen Winn

Audrina is a lurker, which surprises me. She is always there, on the periphery. Sitting, thin ankles crossed, in the waiting room of my being. When she was alive, in her short life, she was vibrant.

I was 11 summer of 1985.

Summer days in the Kocsis household of our youth often meant spending lazy, unstructured mornings in pajamas, eating cereal and French toast with powdered sugar, and watching episodes of Silver Spoons.

Me too

There’s a fine line when you want to sleep too much, when your dreams are more comforting than your reality, when they mix the past and present.

Guess she didn’t come back or was rescued??

Moments in childhood were often like that: too saturated to fully enjoy in real time, their pleasures spiking higher in subsequent recollections, once we had the space to consider them.

the Neutrogena orange soap bar

Smells so so good!

She’d been so tired recently. But when I finished breakfast and my sister still hadn’t made an appearance,

DIABETES! killing herself binge eating Doritos, cheerios, sugar and losing weight, thirsty, nasty from high blood sugar crankiness.

Good ole ketoacidous.

“Yeah, but it was different there. It was like, like not-real yet. Like I was just sick. But now I’m home, and I still have this stupid diabetes.”

Most relatable thing ever!!! Omg. That was me when I was diagnosed.

It had been a big responsibility to be so involved in Audrina’s diabetes, bigger than I had anticipated, especially since she refused to have anything to do with it herself.

“Just diabetes camp from now on. Everything friggin’ diabetes.”

“I mean, could you imagine if you were told you could never eat sweets again, except for one piece of cake on your birthday each year? It’s so unfair.”

It’s awful

“Sometimes I don’t take my insulin. Not like I’m supposed to.” “You don’t take your insulin?” I concentrated hard on the back of my eyelids, trying to see a bit of color, any color. But all that was there was a film of brown mud. “I just don’t want to take it all the time. It’s hard, okay? It’s just hard. Sometimes I just don’t want to think about it every day. Every single freaking day.”

Can relate in the beginning of this disease

They say time slows down, distorts, in moments of crisis. I would read about this phenomenon as an adult, how a part of the brain called the amygdala becomes more active in emotional situations, laying down new, extra bricks of memory, in addition to the normal sets of memories we create. It’s why pivotal moments are seared within us with all their sensory glory.

The more memory bricks your amygdala builds, the longer you believe the event lasted. It’s also why time appears to speed up when you’re older—as a child you are building a brand-new brick house of memories, each one fresh and original, but as an adult your house is already built, and it just occasionally needs some new bricks. You live in your house—the house that memories built—surrounded by and defined by your bricks. Some might say trapped within them, even.

“All that candy,” Mother continued, in a weak voice. “She always dipped into the candy. Halloween—and now, now with the holidays. She was surrounded by candy. She was not being careful with her diabetes. I should’ve known. She, she—” Her voice broke off.

But instead, I looked toward the kitchen. It was suddenly clear that I had made yet another decision I couldn’t take back. One that would forever haunt me. How had I not realized this by now? The impact of small things. Small-very-big things. Each in-the-moment decision leading to the next. Like rungs on a ladder.

if it made her feel awful or if it happened too quickly for her to register.

Trust, it feels beyond awful. I dread it.

Mrs. Wiley anchored herself directly behind Mother, like a wooden frame, and Uncle Arpad clasped Father’s elbow. I was standing in between them—on my own, I supposed; reality had skewed for me. The beauty of the wintry scene that surrounded us kept getting cut, sliced by a knife. At these moments the finality of her death—the knowledge that the box before us held my sister’s dead body—would overcome me.

and I could feel that the softness in her had solidified, like a cooked egg.

A silence followed, and it struck me how the room—the air, the furniture—was exactly the same as it had been a minute earlier, even though I was now unhinged.

And, if I had not taken the charm bracelet piece, would my relationship with my sister have been better? Probably not. Distance from events contracts them, but when you stretch them out, an accordion of actions, you see they are all still related, intertwined by the connecting bellows.

When does the obvious become the obvious?

Your absence left a hole in our family, and in me. In everyone. You may have thought Brian Roslin wasn’t into you, but he sobbed at your funeral. All the boys did. Everyone loved you. You were perfect, despite your diabetes. Because of your diabetes. Because you were so brave—and so very stupid—trying to manage it on your own.