A day later, on the flight back to the States, I stared into the black sky with thoughts of my crash pestering me. Those thoughts showed that I was unresolved and uncomfortable with where my life was headed. My crash in Spain showed me how much I’d changed from who I was before I’d become a racer, and how I differed from who I thought I still am. That crash – like all the others I’ve had, or will have, on various tracks at various speeds – was nothing more than an annoying possibility of my everyday life. Living on the jagged edge, where violence comes at any moment, was my lifestyle. I was living in the goddamned, clichéd fast lane. Aren’t I cool? Yet I was confused as to how I’d gotten to this point from the days when danger was a fearful mystery.

Remembering my fall, as the bike’s forks tucked over and I gave myself into it, fear was only barely present for a flashing instant. What I felt was more akin to mildly irritated concern. Crashing is just something that happens. I’ve done it before, I’m going to do it again. Crashing motorcycles and breaking bones is just a matter of course. It happens to me, it happens to every motorcycle journalist and racer I know. Everyone around me crashes and it’s all just a laugh. Except, of course, when someone dies. Or gets paralyzed.

We have choices. Which life to live, this one or that one; a safe course or a path of risk and violence? Some live long lives, some don’t. Sometimes, the greatest risk seems to just be alive, and from there death is just a matter of timing. Death, a certainty we’re distracted from by the uncertainty of its particular moment of arrival. Religion also provides a distraction from death, promising it to be a beginning, not an end. And in our daily social lives we assist each other in maintaining the distraction, refusing to talk of death, particularly in terms that are concrete and personal. In all of life’s other experiences we seek assurance, but when considering our own death we embrace doubt. Whenever the pain becomes too clear, we cloud it in vagueness, always hoping to blunt the knife that kills. Regardless how small the hope, maybe grabbing for control of death’s moment is the whole struggle.

Or is it all about ignoring that moment?

I was confused, unable to remember how I’d become this person who is so flippant about serious risks. I didn’t understand the bravery others claimed I had. I didn’t recognize myself in my deeds. I couldn’t see myself owning these odd motives that now drove me. Maybe any answers I’d found had eroded from salience to malaise. Maybe I’d played with this toy called risk until I’d broken it, yet still return to it each day. Or maybe I was getting scared. Maybe anguish was rotting my spirit. I was emotionally done with living this dangerous life, but it was the life I was leading. I wanted to walk away, I wanted to stay and play. I lusted for the dangers of riding motorcycles at high-speed and now had to wonder if fear had not become the lust. All reason had succumbed to a twisted feral urge. I no longer knew who I was, or why I do what I do. I’d lost much, I’d solved nothing.