You decide to use “throwback Thursday” to tell some stories from your past. And you’re sifting through stuff you wrote long ago, and you stumble across the stand-alone journal entry you wrote about the fateful day in September of 2003 when your then two-year-old daughter fell and almost bit off her tongue. You remember cranking out these dozen or so pages in one sitting – how the words were almost pulled from you in a stream of conscious marathon – and how you thought at the time that the narrative would require some heavy editing eventually, but you just wanted to capture the details then. And you’ve never looked back since. And maybe now is the time to turn this into a story. So you start to read.

And as you read, your heart begins to race, because the blood and the panic and the horror are all there waiting for you, right where you left them. And you’re back in your breakfast room, and the end of your daughter’s tongue is hanging off, and you’re again possessed with almost superhuman awareness – as if time has slowed for everyone but you. And you hold her in one arm as you reach for your keys and cellphone in one deft movement with the other, while simultaneously stepping into each of your deck shoes and fluidly moving toward the door. In two moments you’re outside. In another three, she’s buckled into her car seat. And you speed out of the driveway while your bloody fingers peck out the number to your wife’s pager, adding “911” to the end of the message. And you speed down the road, running red lights, so you can meet your wife in the Emergency Room and wait. And wait. And wait, all the while trying to keep your daughter from spitting out the hunk of tongue that feels like a foreign object to her.

And then you’re pressing your face to the window of the operating room, trying to see through the closed mini-blinds while your wife holds your daughter down and an overconfident ER doctor attempts to stitch her tongue back on using “conscious sedation” instead of general anesthesia. And then it’s over, and you think maybe everything will be okay. Until the next night, when her stitches fall out, and the anxiety hits you like a wave all over again. And you’re calling for plastic surgeons, and checking your insurance coverage, and afraid that there might be permanent damage, and you don’t understand any of this. And you won’t see a surgeon for another . . . two . . . days.

And even though it all happened a decade ago, and even though your daughter’s tongue healed up fine – and you know that she’s fine, and you’re fine, and everything is fine – you can’t read anymore. Because you lived that nightmare once already, and you can’t live it again, even in print. And the edits to this story will have to wait . . .