The Part I Can’t Remember Still Won’t Let Me Go

I have obsessed about the accident ever since it happened. And I don’t mean casually. I mean obsessed. There aren’t many waking minutes where some part of my brain isn’t circling that moment, or the months that followed it, like a loose tooth I can’t stop touching.

Sure, at work I talk about work things. I think about meetings and deadlines and tasks. But the accident never leaves. It hangs out in the periphery, always there, always waiting.

I’ve said this before, probably more than once thanks to the TBI, but I hate that I can’t remember anything about the accident itself. That entire day is just… gone. I went to work early like I always do. The accident didn’t even happen until the evening. Doesn’t matter. My brain wiped the whole thing, and that absence is infuriating.

One of the things that gnaws at me most is the mechanics of it. Did she hit me? Or did I hit her after she suddenly appeared in my path?

No one seems to fucking know.

One version, the one that made it into the police report, suggests the latter. Other accounts say she attempted a last-second U-turn and side-swiped me. Two completely different stories. And I have no memory to anchor either one.

That’s where having any recollection, from that night or the days immediately after, would be pretty damn helpful.

I was talking about this with my boss between work discussions, because he’s been generous enough to let me process this stuff out loud. I know it can’t be easy to sit with someone who keeps looping back to the same unresolved questions, but he listens.

As part of that conversation, he told me again about the year he lost twelve brothers to motorcycle accidents. Twelve. That number never gets easier to hear. Those losses are why he eventually hung up his helmet.

But then he said something that stuck.

He talked about injuries. About how, when you’ve seen enough crashes, the pattern of damage tells a story. Injuries leave evidence even when memory doesn’t.

And then he pointed out something I hadn’t fully let myself see.

Most of my broken bones were on my left side. The little bit of road rash I had? Right side. That stopped me cold. Because that pattern doesn’t match me hitting her. It matches her hitting me on my left side.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. And it pissed me off even more. Because if that’s true, then what she told the officer wasn’t confusion, it was a lie. An attempt to dodge responsibility. And it strengthens my belief that she was intoxicated, but managed to look “fine” only because the person next to her was worse.

Now here’s the problem: I don’t know what to do with this.

Is it information? Is it evidence? Can logical inference count as truth when memory is gone?

I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that I’m still angry as hell. And that, no matter which version is technically correct, the accident was her fault. One hundred percent.

But the distinction still matters to me.

Because in one version, I’m purely the victim. No chance, no escape. In the other, maybe there was a split second. A razor-thin possibility I could have reacted differently, even if the odds were terrible.

One version means there was nothing I could have done. The other leaves open the idea that maybe … maybe … there was.

And that’s where I am tonight. Sitting with that tension. Looking at the evidence my body carries. Accepting that it all points to the same conclusion: this woman hit me, directly or by side-swiping me, and my life detonated around that moment.

I don’t have resolution yet. I just have the facts my bones remember, even if my mind doesn’t.