Most days, he detaches from the pain, ignores the stares, keeps the bad memories at bay.

But then there are days like this.

For Curtis Lee, Jan. 25 will always bring back demons.

"I've cried a little bit this morning but not a whole lot," he says with a shrug of his shoulders. "I've tried to fight it back."

It's the 12-year anniversary of the accident that took Curtis' right leg and shifted his world into one that for a long time, he barely recognized.

Like last year and the year before, it will be a day spent at home, taking calls from family and friends, waiting for time to pass and tomorrow to start.

But this year, there's a bit of hope in this room that wasn't here before.

 He was 22 when it happened, just married and a new father.

That morning he went to work on a Forsyth County construction site, finished early and met his cousin for a quick lunch. Together, they headed off to another job.

The ground was muddy and his feet sank in as he walked across the field of freshly-cut trees. It was Curtis' job to finish separating the trunk from the stump.

He started the chain saw.

Someone yelled to watch out.

The hum was too loud.

A solid tree trunk fell from a bulldozer onto Curtis' back, pinning him beneath.

He doesn't remember yelling, but his cousin told him later that it was the worst scream he'd heard in his life.

When Curtis looked up, his right toes were on his stomach, his left leg reached out far to his side. Heat pulsed through his chest, the chain saw's muffler still running against his skin.

"Don't move. You're hurt bad," his cousin said, the last words he heard before everything went blank.

Above was an open blue sky, left from the previous day's heavy rain.

The doctors said that if the ground hadn't been soft, allowing the warm mud to press around his wounds, Curtis would have bled to death before the paramedics ever got to him.

In his living room, he says the anniversary is always the hardest day to push that memory back.

He points out the window.

"It's funny that it's raining outside today."

 In the hospital, doctors set him into a drug-induced coma and sliced his legs open to let the wounds breathe. Infection set in quickly.

"You could walk into the room and smell death," his mother, Faye Humphries, says in a hush, remembering the 63 days her son laid helpless in a hospital bed.

When the doctors told her they wanted to amputate, that gangrene could set in and kill him, she told them to wake Curtis up.

"He has to make that decision," she said. "I can't make it for him."

He wouldn't risk never seeing his daughter again, so the choice took just a second. Take it off, Curtis told them.

After the surgery, Faye put a sign on the door.

"Do not enter. Always check with a nurse first."

Soon, she replaced it with another.

"Please don't tell him, ‘I know how you feel.'"

As his mother barely left the hospital over those 63 days, one family member came and went. Two weeks after Curtis got home, his wife told him she couldn't handle it anymore.

"She was done," he says. "I was already down. I mean, kick me when I'm down."

He moved in with his brother, sank into a deep depression and for more than a year, lived in a thick and debilitating fog.

"When I woke up and tried to say, ‘I'm going to have a great day today. It's going to be my day,' by the time I got up and moving it's like, who cares?" he says.

He still has those bad days. They're rare, and Curtis, a man who despises pity and fears being a burden, hides them well.

But back then, they were impossible to avoid.

His family offered help when he didn't want it. And there were times - times he still feels deeply guilty for - when he took out his anger on his mother.

"I said ‘I hate you,'" he says. "And she said ‘I love you.'"

Curtis leaned on a walker, learning to take his first steps with a prosthetic leg.

His daughter Alexis was just learning to walk, too. As he inched forward, she stood under his legs, holding onto the metal beams and wobbling along with him.

"It just tickled me to death," Curtis says with a laugh. "She was my motivation to just get my butt up and straighten yourself out."

But that took time, years of hospital visits and surgeries, hours spent in white waiting rooms. Almost three years after the accident, he finally began to walk with the fear of stumbling on his mind.

Today though, medical challenges still follow him and working has never been an option. Last week, the doctors started talking about the possibility of another surgery.

Most days, he wakes up and wastes time at his parents' home, a small ranch set on a quiet rural street in northwest Hall.

"He's stuck," his father Gary Humphries says, leaning against the kitchen door frame. "Period."

Life has gone on.

His kids don't see him as disabled, and when he keeps up with them on crutches, his mom says, he doesn't move like a hurting man. He still hunts. He coaches his son's football team.

But yes, "I'm stuck," Curtis agrees.

A few weeks after he was injured, the organization that handled workman's compensation for his construction company went bankrupt, leaving him to live off a small fixed income while waiting for a settlement. It's a painstaking process coordinated by attorneys and workman's compensation officials with competing interests. He feels strangely distant from the whole thing.

Curtis is not a bitter man.

His mom says he doesn't have to be; she's bitter enough for the both of them.

But it's hard, he says, to not look back and wonder what could have been.

"I thought I had everything, just starting out my life. My wife. My home. My cars. Everything," he says. "And then now here I am 12 years later, living with my parents. I have a 21-year-old car. I don't really have the funds to do anything. It's just like starting my life again all over."

For 12 years, he's been waiting for someone to give him permission to take his life back.

In a small conference room at the Gainesville Community Service Center, Curtis and his mom sit in the front row and quickly scribble down notes.

Gary heard about this disability seminar and Faye signed them up without telling Curtis where they were going.

"Being a person of disability is like being dropped in the middle of a maze," advocate Cheri Mitchell says to the group.

Curtis nods.

In 12 years, he says, this is the most he's ever heard about support programs for people like himself and had no idea so much was out there.

He looks like a man set free of something, leaning forward in his seat as a calm washes over his face.

"This is the start," he says to Cheri.

In the last week, Curtis has flipped through the pages of that black-and-white checkered notebook dozens of times, ideas spinning in his head for the first time in years.

"It's all he's talked about," his mom says as Curtis again turns the pages.

"I went to this meeting," Curtis says. "And for the last week all I've been doing is trying to figure out which way to go. Where do I want to go? What do I want to do? Who do I want to talk to?"

He already found a meeting group for young adults with disabilities. And on Feb. 3, the anniversary of the day doctors amputated his leg, Curtis will speak before the workman's compensation board for the first time. He's doubtful that a settlement will come from it, but that's not what matters now.

"I'll get to talk to the board," he says. "And I'm really excited about that. Because in these 12 years no one has asked me, ‘What do you want? What do you want to do?'"

He wants to go back to school but isn't sure what to study. His whole family works with heavy machinery, but the doctors said no way, it'll be your death.

He wants to start visiting hospitals and talking to others who recently lost limbs.

He wants to get his own place so his kids can visit more often.

He wants to move forward.

And for the first time in a while, he has excitement and hope and a will to make it happen.

"It's sad that it took 12 years for us to really get some information. It's good stuff. It's positive stuff. And I think there should be more people out there putting it out," he says, shifting in his seat.

He pulls at the leg of his jeans. Underneath is his prosthetic, a part of his life for those long years but something he said will never feel normal. This one is covered in red and orange flames, a pattern his mom picked out. The first had a frog and the words "take a leap of faith."

In these long years, Curtis has never been back to the accident site. His brother has gone a few times, driven past the homes now built where that field of trees once stood.

It's a cold place, his brother said.

People have told Curtis it will be cathartic, bring closure. But he knows it will just keep him stuck in that muddy field, make him see it all again.

"There's no reason for me to go back there," he says. "If I went back there I'd start reliving some of it."

And that's not something Curtis is willing to do anymore.