Day 73

I got a little sideways with Dawn last night. It wasn't intentional but, in hindsight, it was a little thoughtless on my part.

Dawn had called it a night and was trying to fall asleep. I wasn't super tired yet so I continued to pass the time surfing the internet on my phone. Out of boredom, I started looking at motorcycles, visiting websites like Honda, Yamaha, MV Augusta, Ducati and others. At some point, Dawn stirred and asked me what I was looking at (?) so I showed her the picture of the motorcycle I had been studying. She asked me what it was and I told her (Honda NC750x); then she went quiet again. A few minutes later she decrees in stern voice, "You are not getting a motorcycle!" and then proceeded to roll over, away from me, clearly annoyed.  When I asked her what was wrong, she said that I was being selfish and that I should know better than to "...do this now".  A little backstory is probably in order here. 

I owned a motorcycle from June 2016 to May 2019. This was the second bike that I owned. (The first was from 2002 to 2004.) Technically speaking this second bike (Yamaha Tmax) wasn't a motorcycle; it's classified as a scooter. A 530cc (maxi!) scooter that Batman would ride if he owned a scooter. I loved riding my TMax and would very often drive it to and from work instead of my truck. This was especially true when the weather was nice. Which it was the morning of Thursday, May 9, 2019. I was happily trucking along (on my way to work) at 8AM when the driver of a car in the lane next to me decided she wanted to be where I was and came over without looking or any warning. The short version if this story is that the accident was bad enough that I ended up in the hospital for 4 days and spent the rest of 2019 healing broken bones in my multiple places.  

While the accident was bad for me personally, I wasn't the only one who ended up with some scars. Dawn had to don the hat of primary care giver for the first few weeks of my ordeal. It was during this time that she heard countless stories about motorcycle accidents often times told to us by complete strangers who wanted to know what had happened to me. The accidents that we were told about may have happened to the person telling it, or to a relative, a friend or a coworker. The one thing they almost all had in common was that each accident was the fault of somebody else driving a car. After two or three months of motorcycle accident stories, Dawn looked at me one day and said, "Yeah, you're not riding on the street again. You can go ride a dirtbike, but the streets are off limits." I tried to protest, but then she put Damian into the frame. "Until Damian graduates from college and all the bills are paid for, I need you here, and Damian needs his dad. It's not worth the risk. Especially when you have no control over it." I didn't like it, but she was right. I grudgingly resigned myself to the idea that I wasn't going to get to ride street again for a very long time, if ever.  

Fast forward back to last night. Now that our circumstances have changed, I was thinking that I could revisit the idea of a motorcycle much sooner than I had been expecting. Where I got selfish was not thinking about the fact that Dawn needs me now more than ever. This goes both way of course. The last thing either of us need is another tragedy, especially not one this close to home. This journey has already been incredibly hard. I'm not sure how I would have survived it without her. She says the same to me. 

That said, yeah, I wasn't thinking about us. I was thinking about me. I can do better.