There’s a war I’ve been waging for as long as I can remember. It’s not loud. It doesn’t wear camouflage or march in boots. It’s fought in quiet rooms, in the space between my reflection and my own gaze, in the long corridors of thought I walk every day. The battle is simple to name but hard to win: to be better than I was yesterday.
For a long time, I fought it alone. There were no comrades beside me, no voices urging me forward when I stumbled, no hands to lift me when I fell. My victories were small and private, my defeats heavy and unshared. The silence was both armor and prison.
But something shifted. Somewhere between the sunburnt mesas and the high desert air, between the way the light bends differently over these mountains and the way the nights here are cut by the howl of wind, I found people. They don’t know they’re helping me in this fight, but they are. In their words, in their presence, in the way they remember to ask how I’m doing and care enough to listen to the answer.
It’s strange, almost unsettling, to feel cared for as an adult — especially when you’ve lived most of your life believing that kind of thing was for other people. There’s a vulnerability in accepting it, a quiet fear that it could disappear as suddenly as it came. But there’s also gratitude. Deep, marrow-deep gratitude.
Why here? Why Albuquerque, of all places? I can’t say for sure. It could be the geography, or maybe it’s luck, or perhaps it’s something bigger than me. I know there’s crime here — but there’s crime everywhere. Here, no earthquakes are shaking the foundation beneath your feet, no hurricanes tearing the sky open, no floods swallowing the streets whole. Tornadoes don’t come to claim the horizon. Fires, yes — but distant, mostly. The air is dry, free of the heavy hand of humidity. The summers don’t melt you into the pavement, the winters don’t turn you into stone. It’s a place that feels like a compromise between danger and peace, a delicate balance between extremes.
However, the real reason may be more difficult to pinpoint. It could be because here, in this city cut into the desert, I’ve been able to fight my battle differently. Not alone. With quiet allies I never knew I’d have. With a sense — still fragile, still new — that maybe being better than I was yesterday isn’t just about survival. Maybe it’s also about connection.
And that’s worth staying for.
By Kyle J. Hayes
kylehayesblog.com
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