Between Torque and Grief

What a weird fucking week.

Let’s start with the good news, because I need something solid to hold onto: my bike is done. Nyx, my new Harley Road Glide, is awake now. Pipes. Bigger air cleaner. Thundermax ECM. Tune. I know the mechanics over at The FAB Shop did her right. I know they woke her up, gave her more torque, more breath, more attitude. I haven’t even ridden her yet and I can already feel it in my bones.

I’ve got the new seat, sissy bar, and luggage rack sitting at home, waiting for whatever scraps of time I can steal between work and doctor appointments. Nyx is becoming her own thing now. Herself. And I cannot wait to ride her.

Because of course, because life apparently refuses to let anything exist in isolation, I’ve been obsessing over lighting. All the lighting. Turn-this-bike-into-a-fucking-Christmas-tree lighting.

I don’t think it’s paranoia. I think it’s memory.

I got hit by a car on what I genuinely believed was a brightly lit motorcycle. LED headlight. LED running lights. Multiple points of light up front. And still, she said she didn’t see me. Maybe. Or maybe she was drunk and the system failed in the usual, predictable ways. Either way, the outcome was the same.

So now I’m thinking: fine. You want visible? I’ll give you visible.

Dual headlights. Running lights and turn signals embedded in the fairing. Frame-mounted lights down by the engine guards. Light it up so brightly that it’s visible from a fucking mile away. Expensive? Yeah. Worth it? Also yeah.

Because fuck it.

You can’t see a brightly lit Road King at night? Cool. Let’s try an even brighter Road Glide. And if that still doesn’t work, maybe I’ll start bolting spikes onto the thing like a life-sized coronavirus and turn the whole setup into a Mad Max problem for anyone who drifts too close.

That part’s a joke. Mostly.

The truth is, I really don’t want to get hit again. This recovery almost crushed me. Not my body, my spirit. And that’s the part of me that has always survived everything else.

Which brings me to the part I’ve been trying not to look at too closely.

After the accident, once my brain started coming back online, I hired attorneys. I naïvely thought they chased justice. Maybe they do, but only within very narrow, very defined guardrails.

What I’ve learned is this: there is no justice mechanism here.

No pound of flesh. No eye for an eye. No reckoning proportional to harm.

There is only an insurance game.

A system that doesn’t ask what was taken, or what was broken, or what it costs to rebuild a human being. It asks what policies exist. What limits apply. How quietly a life can be reduced back into motion.

The person who hit me? She was barely inconvenienced. Explained a dent. Missed kickoff.

For me, time stopped.

I lost months of my life. I lost momentum in a new role at work. I lost my motorcycle. I lost confidence. The entire left side of my body was wrecked. My face was broken in more places than I realized bones even had names for. Teeth gone. Soft tissue damage everywhere. My left foot and calf are still swollen. I’m still healing from injuries with names no one ever wants to learn.

The day of the accident is gone. ER, gone. Helicopter ride, gone. ICU, mostly gone. My memory doesn’t really pick back up until discharge to rehab.

And then there’s the brain.

I know I’m not as quick as I used to be. Not “I’m getting older” slow, but TBI slow. Memory gaps. Processing delays. Relearning how to learn. Relearning how to lead. Sitting on the edge of tears multiple times a day for no clear reason other than: damage.

Yesterday, the lawyers called.

They’re at the stage where they talk about outcomes. Not justice, outcomes. And I realized something that landed hard in my chest: the system didn’t ask her to make this right. It asked me what insurance I had bought. What coverage I had paid for. What protections I had the foresight, or luck, to carry.

That’s not accountability. That’s self-funded survival.

The money that might help me put my life back together doesn’t come from the person who broke it. It comes from policies I carried, bills that get paid back first, cuts taken along the way, and whatever acknowledgement is left over that I existed and was harmed.

I know I’m supposed to be grateful. Something is more than nothing. Plenty of people get nothing.

I know all of that.

And still, it hurt.

It hurt to realize that my life fits inside a negotiating range. That the value of what I lost is decided by averages and actuarial tables. That the question isn’t “What did this do to her?” but “What would the average person accept and move on?”

I’m not that person.

So that’s where I am today. Hovering between excitement and grief. Torque and loss. Deeply grateful my bike is ready, and quietly aware that I’m still catching up to my own life.

Maybe later I can get lost on Nyx.

Oh wait, nope. Doctor appointments and pool league.

Fuck.