I Had to Tighten My Left Boot Today

I had to tighten my left boot today, and it felt pretty goddamned good.

For context: yes, my motorcycle boots are lace-up; but no, they don’t need to be tightened every time I put them on. They’ve got a zipper on the side. When I first get boots, I lace them snug, then use the zipper day to day, tightening them occasionally as the leather stretches during break-in.

These are newer boots. I bought them after the accident … to replace the ones I lost.

That’s a part people don’t really talk about when a motorcyclist gets hit. Everyone focuses on the injuries or the fatalities, and rightly so. But nobody warns you that most of your gear is going to be destroyed too.

My boots were toast, especially the left one, the side that took the brunt of it. My chaps somehow survived. My jacket and vest were cut off by EMTs. My helmet took some hits and probably looked reusable, but helmets lose their DOT rating after a crash, so it had to be replaced. My goggles shattered. My gloves were scraped raw. The clothes on my body were cut away, no different than any other unconscious crash victim.

So once the fog lifted enough for me to take stock of what I still owned, the reality hit: I had to replace almost all of my motorcycle gear.

Fuck.

That’s a lot of fucking money. I was wearing about two thousand dollars’ worth of gear that now lived in the trash.

So on top of healing, on top of trying to get well enough to return to work before short-term disability ran out, I also had to replace my gear before I could swing a leg over my remaining V-twin.

And I fucking did it. One goddamned piece at a time.

Here’s something non-motorcyclists might not fully understand: in addition to wearing a lot of gear, riders tend to curate their look. Over time, you pick up pieces-custom items, discontinued things, battle-scarred favorites-that help define who you are on the road.

You can’t put a price tag on that.

And a crash takes it anyway.

Some pieces I replaced exactly. Some I upgraded. Some I had to settle for “close enough.” But piece by piece, I rebuilt my kit.

When my new boots arrived, I tore off the packaging and tried them on. They fit.

Sort of.

My left leg and foot were still massively swollen from the crash and surgeries. My foot had been held together with pins because so many things were broken in it. The pins came out. Healing started. But the swelling never really left.

For over three months.

Everything from about six inches above my left knee all the way down to my fucking pinky toe stayed swollen. Constantly.

My motorcycle boots became the only footwear I could wear. Every other shoe and boot I owned wouldn’t fit over my left foot. At all.

So today, like every day, I lotioned my feet and pulled on my socks. My calf still felt thick. My foot didn’t look dramatically different.

But something was.

Everything was just a little bit smaller.

Enough smaller that for the first time since the crash, my left boot felt loose.

So I tightened it.

And that tiny, stupid, mundane act, pulling a lace tighter, felt like a victory. Like maybe my body is finally finishing the job. Like maybe by summer, I’ll feel whole again.

Because today, I had to tighten my left boot.