Well, fuck.
How many of my blogs start with those two words, I wonder? Most of them? A lot of them? A statistically significant percentage of them? Yeah, I'm getting pretty fucking scientific here.
And yet, most times, those are the most fitting words I can find. Tonight is no exception.
Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night, because apparently sleeping through the night is a luxury my body has decided I no longer deserve. Throw in the time change, and the whole fucking thing becomes even more ridiculous.
But after writing yesterday's blog, I found myself thinking about my goddamned motorcycle accident again. So I went back and read some of the blogs I wrote while recovering from being hit on Cerrillos Road, and holy fuck, I wasn't prepared for what came rushing back.
Anger. Sorrow. Frustration. Memories of pain, of hospitals, of trying to put my fucking life back together after somebody made a bad decision behind the wheel.
Over a fucking year later, and there it all was, waiting for me.
I might have left it there, but when I went looking for some mind-numbing social media bullshit to lull my ass back to sleep, I came across a post from the Santa Fe mayor's office announcing the city's new police chief. And there was the usual political self-congratulation about public safety, traffic enforcement, automated monitoring, and all the wonderful things the city is supposedly doing to keep us safe.
Well, isn't that fucking interesting?
On October 27, 2025, a woman turned her car directly across my path on Cerrillos Road. I hit her vehicle, went flying, and eventually woke up in a hospital with injuries that would take months to recover from. I was airlifted to Albuquerque, spent more than three weeks in the hospital, and came home to a recovery I wouldn't wish on anybody.
And as far as I knew, the woman who caused all of that hadn't even received a fucking traffic ticket.
So, naturally, I got pissed off.
I wrote the new police chief an email, copying the mayor and city manager for good fucking measure. I asked what had happened to the investigation, why nobody seemed able to tell me whether a citation had been issued, and how the city could spend so much time bragging about traffic enforcement while apparently losing track of a crash that nearly killed somebody.
I wasn't particularly optimistic. I'd been down this road before, and the last time I asked these questions, I was told the case had somehow fallen through the cracks. Somebody was going to look into it. Somebody was going to fix it. Somebody was going to get back to me.
You know. Government stuff.
So I sent the email and went to work.
And fuck, work sucked.
I'm not going to bore you with the details, but it seemed like I spent the entire day pleading with unreasonable people to put their egos aside and make good decisions. Apparently, that was asking a little too fucking much. By the time I finally got home, I was exhausted, frustrated, and ready to be done with humanity for a while.
Making it harder to unwind was the fact that Dawna was traveling across the country, coming home from Oregon. I'm excited to have her home, obviously, but I also worry when she's on the road. Because apparently nearly getting killed in traffic has done absolutely nothing to improve my ability to relax when somebody I love is driving.
And speaking of Dawna, it's been a while since I've bored my readers with declarations of love, so let me take care of that. Have I mentioned how much I fucking love this woman?
A lot. A lot is the correct fucking answer.
Anyway, I'm lying in bed, trying to unwind, when I check my email.
And holy fuck. The police chief wrote me back.
Three fucking times.
First, he apologized for how long I'd waited for answers and promised to look into the investigation. Then he explained that, following my inquiries earlier this year, the case had finally been assigned to a traffic officer. On March 31, five months after the accident, the officer issued a citation to the woman who hit me.
Then came the third email.
The woman had appeared in court back in May, pleaded no contest, and received a deferred sentence.
Well, fuck.
So there it was. The answer I'd spent more than a year trying to get.
She had been cited. She had gone to court. And the court had decided that a deferred sentence was an appropriate resolution.
Now, I understand that deferred sentences are part of our legal system. I understand that not every traffic violation results in somebody being dragged off to prison, and I'm not suggesting that it should. I don't know everything the judge considered, and I haven't seen the actual judgment.
But I do know what happened to me.
I know about the helicopter ride I don't remember. I know about the hospital stay, the surgeries, the injuries, the pain, and the months of recovery. I know what it feels like to look in the mirror and see the evidence of something you can't even fucking remember happening.
That's one of the cruelest parts of this whole experience. There's a hole in my memory where the accident should be. I know what happened because of police reports, medical records, and the people who witnessed it. I know that I was riding my motorcycle one moment, and then my life became a collection of hospital rooms, medical appointments, and painful little victories as I tried to become myself again.
But the actual moment when everything changed?
Gone.
And I can't get it back.
The supplemental police report was another interesting read. The officer interviewed a witness who described seeing the car turn in front of me, seeing the impact, and watching me fly through the air. The witness was worried another vehicle might run me over, so he positioned his own vehicle to protect me.
Think about that for a fucking moment.
A stranger saw me lying in the road and was worried enough about my safety to use his own vehicle to protect me from traffic.
I don't remember any of it.
I wish I did. I'd like to thank him.
The officer also reported that he couldn't locate body-camera footage from the original investigation. Without that footage or additional evidence, he couldn't establish reckless driving or impairment, so the citation was issued for the traffic violation.
And I get that. The law requires evidence. It should. I've spent enough time writing about liberty to know that we can't simply punish people according to how angry somebody else happens to be.
Even when that somebody is me.
But understanding the legal process doesn't make the outcome feel any less fucking hollow.
Because here I am, more than a year later, still dealing with the consequences of somebody else's decision. And after all the emails, all the questions, all the waiting, and all the promises that somebody would finally figure out what happened, the answer arrived.
The case was handled. The court made its decision. Life went on.
Except my life didn't just go on.
My life stopped on Cerrillos Road that October evening, and I spent months trying to get it moving again.
And tonight, sitting here with the answers I'd been demanding for so long, I find myself feeling something I wasn't expecting.
Sad.
Just really fucking sad.
I thought getting an answer might make me feel better. Maybe I thought knowing somebody had finally been held accountable would give me some sense of closure. Maybe I was expecting some official acknowledgment that what happened to me mattered beyond a few lines in a police report.
Instead, I got an email telling me how the case was resolved.
And somehow, that made everything feel smaller.
Not the accident. Not the injuries. Not the recovery. Those were enormous, life-changing things. But the legal resolution of it all felt so fucking insignificant compared to what I'd lived through.
And now I'm left trying to figure out what to do with that.
Because I can't go back and change what happened. I can't make the court see the accident through my eyes, especially when I can't even remember the fucking thing myself. I can't get those months back, and I can't undo the fear, the pain, or the uncertainty that came afterward.
I can keep writing emails. I can keep asking questions. And there are still questions worth asking, particularly about why the investigation took so long to reach the point of issuing a citation.
But at some point, I have to ask myself what I'm actually looking for.
Justice?
Closure?
Some kind of cosmic acknowledgment that I got a really fucking raw deal?
I don't know.
And that's what bothers me tonight. I don't have a clever answer. I don't have some profound observation about liberty or government accountability that ties everything together in a neat little bow. I don't even have a particularly good punchline.
I'm just a woman who got on her motorcycle one October evening, nearly lost her life, and spent the following year trying to make sense of what happened.
And tonight, after finally getting the answers I'd been asking for, I'm realizing that knowing what happened in court doesn't change what happened to me.
Maybe letting go means accepting that the justice I imagined was never something the legal system could give me. Maybe it means recognizing that I survived, that I recovered, and that I still have a life worth living, even if parts of it look different now.
Or maybe I'm not ready to let it go yet.
I don't fucking know.
What I do know is that there is no good that can come from spending the rest of my life chasing a version of justice that may never materialize. I've already lost enough to that accident. I don't want to keep handing it pieces of whatever life I have left.
But knowing that and actually feeling it are two very different fucking things.
And tonight, I'm having a hard time bridging the distance between them.
Well, fuck.
