One Fucking Year

One Fucking Year

This month will mark one year since an evening ride turned into a hole in my memory.

On October 27, 2025, I was riding down Cerrillos Road, enjoying an evening on my motorcycle, when an anxious driver coming from the opposite direction decided to make a U-turn and changed my fucking life.

I don't remember the impact. I don't remember hitting the pavement. There's just a hole where those moments should be, followed by a long, painful journey back to something resembling normal.

I broke bones up and down the left side of my body. My left foot was mangled, and every one of my metatarsals had to be pinned back into place. My left knee lost a large patch of skin, presumably from hitting the tank. My left radius snapped near the wrist, requiring a plate and screws to put it back together. Most of the bones in my face were broken. My left ribs fractured, puncturing my left lung. My trachea was fucked up. I suffered a traumatic brain injury that left me unable to think straight for fucking months.

And then there was my lip.

My lower lip was ripped open all the way down to my chin. They sewed it back together, but it became infected, so they had to cut it open again and scrape everything out. I spent months walking around with a gigantic fucking hole in my lower lip.

My motorcycle, Lilith, was totaled.

And just like that, an ordinary evening ride became the beginning of the hardest fucking year of my life.

I spent weeks in the hospital, slowly putting myself back together. At some point, I fought to build enough strength to move my ass from a hospital bed into a wheelchair. With only one functioning arm, I learned to push myself around. At night, I practiced transferring myself from the bed to the chair to the fucking toilet, using only my right arm and leg.

Think about that for a moment. Something as simple as taking a piss became an exercise in engineering, determination, and sheer fucking stubbornness.

Eventually, I made it home. But home presented an entirely new set of challenges. Stairs, for example. I couldn't walk up them, so I learned to push myself up backward, one fucking step at a time. Move my ass onto the next stair. Reposition. Push again. Repeat until I reached the top.

Laundry became an ordeal. Dishes became an ordeal. Every ordinary little thing I had done without thinking suddenly required planning, effort, and sometimes more strength than I thought I had left.

And there was my motorcycle.

I still had one bike left, and I stared at her longingly, dreaming of the day I could throw a leg over her, twist the fucking throttle, and feel the world moving around me again.

Eventually, I worked my way onto a walker and started relearning how to fucking walk. One goddamned hop at a time. One exhausting little movement after another.

And at night, when nobody was around, I cried.

I cried because I hurt. I cried because I was exhausted. I cried because I couldn't do the things I had always done. I cursed the woman who hit me. I cursed God for throwing yet another fucking obstacle in my way. I cursed the circumstances that had turned a perfectly ordinary evening into months of pain, dependence, and frustration.

But every morning, I got up.

I put one foot in front of the fucking other, figuratively at first and eventually quite literally, and kept going.

I held my head high, even when people stared. And people fucking stared. My face was a mess, and I knew it. They couldn't help looking, and I couldn't exactly blame them. I couldn't even drink a cup of coffee without half of it spilling down my fucking chin. But I figured that out too. A straw and a strategically placed napkin became part of my morning routine.

Five months after the accident, they finally sewed my lip back together. It's still not right, but at least my fucking mouth closes now.

It took months longer for my brain to start feeling like my brain again. Months for the fog to lift. Months for the pain to mostly fade into the background. Months of learning what my body could do, discovering what it couldn't, and pushing the boundaries a little farther every fucking day.

And now, almost a full year later, I think I feel about as close to normal as I'm ever going to feel.

But here's the thing.

While I was busy putting my body back together, the rest of my life was changing too.

A long-term affair I'd been involved in ended abruptly. And that fucking hurt in ways that had nothing to do with broken bones. Life has a funny way of revealing exactly where you stand in someone else's priorities, and I discovered that I had never really been the serious consideration I thought I was. I had allowed myself to be used, and when that reality finally became impossible to ignore, it broke my fucking heart.

But it also opened a door.

Because somewhere on the other side of that heartbreak, I found a woman who loves me. A woman who wants to be with me. A woman who is genuinely happy to see me every fucking day, and someone I am equally happy to see.

I have a fiancée.

And I fucking love her.

Not because she fills some empty space or because I need someone to put me back together. I've spent the better part of a year proving I can put my own fucking self back together. I love her because she brings warmth into my life. Because she makes me smile. Because she is there. Because I get to share the ordinary little moments with someone who actually wants to share them with me.

After everything I've been through, there's something pretty fucking extraordinary about that.

And then there's the writing.

In the middle of all this, I published two books. Two actual fucking books with my name on the covers. And I've written a third, which will be coming soon.

I've spent years writing, thinking about writing, talking about writing, and occasionally wondering whether I had anything worth saying. Somewhere along the way, I stopped wondering and started fucking doing it.

I have direction now. Not just things I want to accomplish someday, but a path I'm actively walking. I want to write. I want to publish. I want to leave something behind that lasts longer than I do.

And I finally believe I'm capable of doing it.

That's probably the biggest change of all.

I know who I am.

And I finally fucking value myself.

That might sound like a strange thing to discover at this stage of life, especially for someone who's already survived more than her fair share of shit. But there's a difference between knowing you can endure something and believing you're worthy of something better.

For a long time, I was pretty fucking good at enduring.

This year, I started learning how to live.

I don't want to romanticize what happened to me. I wouldn't wish that accident on anybody. I wouldn't volunteer to go through the broken bones, the surgeries, the pain, the sleepless nights, the tears, or the months of fighting just to do things most people take for granted.

And I sure as fuck wouldn't thank the woman who hit me.

She didn't give me some wonderful gift. She nearly killed me, destroyed my motorcycle, and left me with injuries I'll probably carry for the rest of my life.

But what happened afterward? What I did with the life I had left?

That's mine.

I fought my way out of that hospital bed. I fought my way up those fucking stairs. I fought my way back onto my feet. I fought through heartbreak, uncertainty, pain, and more than a few nights when I wasn't sure how much more I had left in me.

And somewhere along the way, I found love. I found purpose. I found a direction I want to travel. I found a woman who makes me happy to wake up in the morning.

And maybe most importantly, I found a version of myself who finally understands that she deserves to be fucking happy.

One year ago, I was lying broken on a stretch of Cerrillos Road, my motorcycle destroyed and my future suddenly uncertain.

Today, I'm writing books. I'm riding motorcycles. I'm building a life with a woman I love. I'm making plans for a future that, for a little while, I wasn't entirely sure I was going to have.

This has been the hardest fucking year of my life.

And somehow, it's also been one of the most extraordinary.

I'm not grateful for the accident.

I'm grateful I survived it.

I'm grateful I got up every fucking morning, even when getting up was the hardest thing I had to do.

I'm grateful for the doors that opened, the things I learned, the love I found, and the woman I've become.

A year ago, somebody else's thoughtless decision knocked me off my motorcycle and shattered my body.

But it didn't fucking finish me.

And one year later, I have a life I'm genuinely fucking grateful to be living.