People still look at me strangely when I tell them I chose New Mexico.
Not passed through.
I didn’t end up here by accident.
Not got stranded by work, family, disaster, or one of those wrong turns life has a way of dressing up as destiny.
I chose it.
And I understand why that sounds strange to some people. New Mexico is not always the place people are taught to imagine when they are dreaming out loud. It does not shout for your attention the way other places do. It does not beg to be admired. It sits there beneath that impossible sky, all red earth and distance, all wind and silence, all mountains watching like old witnesses, and waits to see if you are the kind of person who can be still long enough to understand it.
I may not have understood it when I came here.
I only know that I came.
And the longer I stay, the more I wonder whether choosing is sometimes only the name we give to being led.
I know how that sounds.
I know how strange it can feel to speak of God in a world that has learned to explain everything, leaving nothing sacred. We want clean answers. We want maps, logic, strategy, relocation plans, job prospects, rental prices, and practical reasons that fit neatly in the mouth.
But some things do not fit.
Some things happen below language.
Some places do not just receive you.
They work on you.
New Mexico has worked on me.
I know there is another life I might have lived. A smaller one. Not evil. Not worthless. Just narrow enough to make me forget the sound of my own becoming. Maybe that is why I look at New Mexico with such wonder. It did not simply give me a place to live. It gave me distance from the life that might have closed around me.
Not loudly. Not all at once. Not with some grand cinematic gesture where the sky opens, and the old self falls away. It has been quieter than that. More patient. More humiliating, in the way healing can be humiliating when it shows you how long you mistook your wounds for your personality.
The anger I carried for most of my life did not disappear overnight. Anger rarely does. It had roots. It had memory. It had reasons. Some of them were honest. Some of them were old defenses that had outlived their usefulness. Anger had been my armor, my witness, my proof that what happened mattered. Resentment had been a bitter little fire I kept alive because I feared that if I let it go, the world would get away with what it had done.
But something about this place began to make the fire unnecessary.
Maybe it was the sky.
That sounds too simple, but the sky here is not simple. It is a thing with depth. It can make a man feel both small and held. It stretches over you like a question you cannot answer quickly. Morning light hits the Sandias and makes them look less like mountains than scripture written in stone. Evening comes down slow, blue and gold and purple, as if the day itself is reluctant to leave.
Some places crowd you.
New Mexico opened something.
It gave me room to hear myself without the old noise. Room to ask what I was carrying. Room to wonder if every burden deserved to be carried forever.
And in that room, my writing changed.
Or maybe I changed, and the writing followed.
Before New Mexico, I wrote from a harder place. A place of clenched teeth. A place where every sentence had to prove I had survived. There was power in that. I will not insult the old version of myself by pretending he had nothing to offer. He kept me alive. He carried me through years I still do not always know how to name. He wrote with blood because blood was what he had.
But here, something began to soften.
Not weaken.
Soften.
There is a difference.
Softening is not surrender. It is not becoming harmless. It is learning that tenderness can be a form of strength when it has survived the furnace and still chooses not to become cruel.
My writing blossomed here because I was finally allowed to become more than my pain.
That may be the deepest gratitude I have.
New Mexico did not ask me to stop telling the truth. It simply showed me that truth had more than one temperature. It could burn, yes. But it could also warm. It could feed. It could sit at a kitchen table beside green chile, coffee, bread, and silence, and still say what needed to be said.
I found people here who cared.
That sentence looks small on the page, but it isn’t to me.
I found people who did not treat art like foolishness. People who did not look at writing as some strange indulgence, some childish dream a grown man should outgrow. I found writers. Artists. Chefs. Jewelry designers. Makers of beautiful things. People who understood that creation is not always decoration. Sometimes creation is survival. Sometimes it is testimony. Sometimes it is the only way a person can turn the pieces of himself into something that may help somebody else breathe.
They let me know it was okay to write.
Okay to express.
Okay to find out who I truly was.
Okay to share it.
That kind of permission can change a life.
Not because a person should need permission to become himself, but because many of us come from places, families, histories, and wounds where the self was something we learned to hide. We learned to be useful before we learned to be honest. We learned to endure before we learned to speak. We learned to make ourselves smaller so the world would not notice how much we were carrying.
And then, somehow, I found myself here.
In a place where art is not hidden away.
It is on the walls. Around necks. In markets. In kitchens. In books. In the hands of people who shape silver, clay, chile, sentences, bread, paint, and memory. Here, beauty is not always polished. Sometimes it is rough-edged and sun-baked. Sometimes it smells like roasting chile and dust after rain. Sometimes it is turquoise against brown skin, a bowl of posole, a poem read in a room full of strangers, a balloon rising into the morning while I stand firmly on the ground, grateful to admire what I have no intention of riding.
I still look at those balloons with wonder.
A field full of color lifting into the sky like somebody decided joy needed a body.
And no, I doubt I will ever ride one.
There are still fears I have not conquered.
I can admit that now without shame.
Once, I might have seen every fear as evidence against me. As proof that I had not become enough. But I am learning that life is not conquered all at once. Some fears remain not to mock us, but to remind us that we are still human. I can stand beneath the balloons and marvel. I can watch them rise. I can honor the courage of those who climb into the basket and float into the open air.
And I can keep my feet on the earth.
That, too, is a kind of wisdom.
New Mexico has taught me that becoming does not always look dramatic. Sometimes becoming is waking up and realizing you are less angry than you used to be. Sometimes it is noticed that the old resentment does not answer as quickly when called. Sometimes it is writing a sentence and realizing it came from peace, not injury. Sometimes it is looking around your life and seeing, with a kind of stunned humility, that what once felt impossible has quietly become real.
I have changed here.
I do not say that lightly.
My problems did not vanish because I crossed a state line. Pain is not that simple. A man brings himself wherever he goes. His ghosts pack light. They know how to travel.
But here, many of mine began to lose their grip.
Some of that was time.
Some of that was work.
Some of that was people.
And some of it, I believe, was God.
I cannot prove that in the way the world likes proof. I cannot show a receipt for grace. I cannot chart mercy on a map. I only know that I came here carrying things I thought would always be mine, and now some of them no longer fit in my hands.
That feels like God to me.
Not always thunder.
Sometimes release.
Sometimes a door opens in a place you never expected to call home.
So this is my gratitude.
For the desert that did not ask me to explain myself.
For the mountains that stood there while I became quieter.
For the artists who made expression feel possible.
For the cooks who reminded me that food is memory and care.
For the writers who made the page feel less lonely.
For the people who showed me that community does not always announce itself with noise. Sometimes it comes gently, through encouragement, through conversation, through a simple belief that what you are making matters.
For the balloons, I will admire from below.
For the sky that keeps making me look up.
For the anger that is leaving.
For the words that came back changed.
For the man I was.
For the man I am becoming.
For New Mexico.
The land I chose.
Or maybe the land that was chosen for me.
Kyle J. Hayes
kylehayesblog.com
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