I Am Here

—   •   —

He had not planned to write about his birthday.

There had been no grand idea waiting for him when he woke up that morning, no carefully constructed lesson about aging, family, purpose, or the meaning of another year. August 22 was simply there when he opened his eyes, the same way every other day arrived—without asking what he expected from it.

He was forty-seven.

That was apparently the fact of the day.

And, as usual, life had no intention of explaining itself.

Romeo began the morning in one of the places that had become familiar to him: a parking lot outside the gym, waiting for the doors to open. It was Saturday, which meant LA Fitness would not open until eight. He sat there watching the minutes pass, already awake, already thinking, already carrying around more thoughts than anybody reasonably needed before breakfast.

When the doors finally opened, he trained chest and biceps, with a little shoulder work added in. Nothing ceremonial about it. No birthday exemption from discipline. Forty-seven apparently still meant picking up heavy shit and putting it back down again.

By the time he finished, he felt good.

There was something particularly satisfying about sitting in the parking lot afterward and realizing that there was nowhere he urgently needed to be. No work ticket. No federal IT emergency. No computer demanding resurrection. No manager waiting for an update. It was Saturday.

His birthday.

For once, he could simply sit.

But Romeo had never been particularly good at doing only one thing inside his own head.

Books soon entered the conversation.

He had been thinking about the prices of Coffee and The Pecan Pie — The Bittersweet and its second book, Dark Roast — The Birth of a New Beginning. The numbers bothered him—not because the royalty was too small, but because the books themselves felt too expensive.

That distinction mattered.

He had never convinced himself that publishing was going to make him rich. If anything, he seemed almost suspicious of the idea. What he wanted was much simpler.

He wanted somebody to read the damn things.

A book sitting online at an impressive price while nobody touched it seemed less useful to him than a cheaper book that actually found its way into somebody's hands.

Virtual dust was still dust.

So he lowered the prices.

Book One eventually settled at $7.74, leaving him roughly seventy-five cents in royalty.

Book Two came down to $14.65, leaving him somewhere around a dollar.

Not exactly the beginnings of a literary empire.

But that wasn't the point.

If somebody bought the book, opened it, read it, carried it somewhere, handed it to someone else, or simply placed it on a shelf where it became part of their life for a little while, then the book had moved.

It had existed beyond him.

That mattered more.

The day kept moving.

At some point, Jonalyn appeared.

She was Romeo’s neighbor, someone he had crossed paths with and spoken to a couple of times. He did not really know her yet. That was precisely the point. His interest had never been some grand obsession with a stranger. He had simply found her interesting and had wondered what it might be like to actually get to know her beyond the occasional passing encounter between neighbors.

And because Romeo was Romeo, a perfectly ordinary parking-lot encounter immediately became a minor psychological event.

She had gotten out of her vehicle carrying a large plastic container. It did not appear particularly heavy, but it was bulky enough that Romeo immediately thought he should help her.

Unfortunately, his own vehicle was already running.

Worse, he was already halfway out.

There was still technically time to stop, repark, get out, walk over, and offer assistance.

There was also enough time for Romeo's brain to imagine approximately twenty-seven reasons why doing exactly that might look completely ridiculous.

So he continued driving.

Then immediately regretted continuing driving.

Of course.

That was the natural order of things.

For the next several minutes, his mind treated the missed opportunity as though history had presented him with the decisive diplomatic moment of the century and he had somehow failed to sign the treaty.

The book he had once thought about giving Jonalyn was sitting right there beside him.

That certainly did not help.

He berated himself.

He laughed at himself.

He called himself a dork several times.

Then, eventually, he had to admit the much less interesting truth.

He had simply been leaving when he noticed her.

That was all.

There would be other parking lots.

Other containers.

Other ordinary opportunities.

Life had not ended because Batdork failed to respond to the Container Signal.

The afternoon had somewhere else to take him.

He drove to Ann's house to see Joey.

At first, even that became complicated.

Joey was sitting at his desktop computer playing games online with his friends and was not ready to leave. Ann mentioned that she and the kids had already been invited to Romeo's brother's gathering and questioned why Romeo needed to go with Joey.

Because he wanted to go with his son.

That was Romeo's answer.

Ann asked why again, suggesting perhaps it was so people could say what a good father he was.

No.

He simply wanted to go with his son.

For a moment, Romeo considered leaving.

He had driven there. He had tried. Joey was not ready. The atmosphere suddenly felt uncomfortable, and an old familiar thought rose in him:

He had done his part.

He always tried.

Maybe that was enough.

Then Joey took a shower.

So Romeo waited.

Sometimes life turned because somebody finally got off the computer and took a shower.

And while Romeo waited at Ann’s house, his mind wandered back toward the books again.

At some point during all of this, Romeo found himself asking another question.

Why did he write?

It seemed absurd that someone with multiple books, more projects underway, an entire website, journals, stories, and JARBIT occupying an increasingly unreasonable amount of mental real estate should suddenly need to ask himself why he bothered.

But apparently even writers forget why they write.

Maybe especially writers.

He knew, somewhere underneath everything, that sales had never been the answer.

He wrote because ideas bothered him until they had somewhere to go.

He wrote because something could exist only inside his mind one moment and then become a sentence, a chapter, a character, a world, a physical book.

There was something almost miraculous about that transition.

Nothing.

Then something.

A thought.

Then pages.

Then a cover.

Then a book he could physically hold.

He did not need everybody to approve of it. He knew himself well enough to understand that. Other people could like his writing, dislike it, ignore it, criticize it, misunderstand it, or never discover it at all.

He still knew what it was worth to him.

Still, sometimes a man who knows his own worth needs somebody to remind him that the engine is running.

That was all.

He needed a little ignition.

Then another question followed.

Was he a bad author?

The answer did not need to be flattering to be useful.

He was not a finished author. He still had things to learn. He could overwrite. He could sometimes try to fit too many ideas into one scene. He could explain something twice because he cared so much about making sure the reader understood it. He could revise until revision itself threatened to become a full-time occupation.

But those were craft problems.

They were not proof that he had no business writing.

What mattered was that he cared whether the story worked. He cared whether the emotions felt human. He cared whether his characters had reasons for what they did. He was willing to tear something apart and rebuild it if it stopped feeling true.

A writer could improve.

A writer should improve.

And perhaps someday he would look back at these early books and see everything he would now do differently.

Good.

That would mean he had kept going.

He did not need strangers to declare him worthy of creating.

He just needed to keep creating.

Eventually Joey was ready.

And they went.

Romeo had expected something larger at his brother's house. Maybe his sisters would be there. Maybe more relatives. Maybe the kind of birthday gathering where people moved constantly through rooms carrying food and talking over one another.

Instead, there were only a few of them.

His brother.

His mother.

His father.

Ann.

Joey.

Zach.

And Romeo.

That was it.

At first he could not quite explain why the arrangement felt strange.

It was not awkward.

Nobody argued.

Nobody sat in uncomfortable silence.

In fact, the opposite happened.

They talked.

They ate.

They laughed.

His parents socialized. Joey played PS5. Zach occupied himself with his phone or whatever mysterious activity teenagers performed while staring into glowing rectangles.

Romeo and Ann talked.

They joked.

His parents joked with them.

For several hours, nobody seemed particularly interested in the complicated history that had brought all of them into that room.

They were simply there.

Then something small happened.

His mother encouraged everyone to take food home. Containers appeared, as they inevitably did whenever Filipinos gathered within a fifty-mile radius of cooked food.

Without thinking much about it, Romeo turned to Ann and asked her to get some food for him.

The words came naturally.

So naturally that he barely noticed what he had done.

Ann immediately joked back.

Go get your own. This is mine. What are you talking about?

But she helped him anyway.

And Romeo helped get food for her.

It was nothing.

And it was not nothing.

Eighteen years and more of shared life had created thousands of tiny habits that divorce could change but could not retroactively erase. They did not need to discuss them. Their bodies remembered the choreography.

Ask her for the container.

Give him a hard time.

Help anyway.

Get something for her.

Move around each other without instructions.

For a moment, the old machinery still knew how to run.

That was when the feeling became difficult to name.

There was no desire to rewrite history.

There was no sudden declaration that the past should return.

It was simply familiar.

Painfully, pleasantly, strangely familiar.

Bittersweet.

Of course it had to be that word.

Romeo had already written an entire book around it.

Maybe that was what bittersweet actually was—not happiness poisoned by sadness or sadness rescued by happiness, but the strange ability of both things to occupy the same chair without arguing over who belonged there.

His parents seemed happy.

They knew Romeo and Ann were divorced. Nobody had forgotten. Nobody seemed to be pretending.

But they appeared happy simply because both of them were there.

Together with the kids.

Getting along.

Laughing.

For a few hours, the room looked like an old photograph that had somehow begun moving again.

Romeo recognized it.

This used to be normal.

That recognition did not demand anything from him.

It simply existed.

Then the birthday offered him another surprise.

Romeo had brought a copy of his first book.

He gave it to his father.

He had assumed his mother would probably be more interested in reading it.

He was wrong.

His father became excited.

Actually excited.

He wanted to read it.

He wanted Book Two when Romeo got another copy.

He wanted JARBIT when that book was finished.

Romeo explained The Bittersweet series and some of what he was still planning to write. His father listened with interest.

He wanted the books.

All of them.

Romeo showed him the RomNote website and told him about the audio material there because his father liked listening to stories.

That realization landed differently than Romeo expected.

His father liked stories.

And now his son's life contained stories he could actually read.

Or hear.

There was something quietly remarkable about that.

A father could know his son for forty-seven years and still discover another room inside him.

Here were the stories.

Here were the journals.

Here were the ridiculous robots.

Here were the memories.

Here was the son speaking in a voice that ordinary family conversations might never completely reveal.

And his father wanted to hear it.

Earlier that afternoon, while sitting at Ann’s house waiting for Joey, Romeo had wondered whether he was a bad author.

By evening, his father was asking where the next book was.

Life had timing like that sometimes.

There had also been cake.

Before Zach ate it, everyone needed to make sure there were no peanuts because of his allergy. Romeo inspected the label and asked his trusted artificial intelligence to help verify what it said. Peanuts were not listed as ingredients, though shared-equipment warnings still mattered.

That question somehow became dinuguan.

Dinuguan became religion.

Religion became Iglesia ni Cristo.

Iglesia ni Cristo became Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons.

And somehow, because human conversation had no respect whatsoever for logical transitions, eventually they arrived at Pastafarianism and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

This was apparently how family scholarship worked in 2026.

Someone asked a question.

Romeo produced Jarvis.

Within minutes everyone was discussing whether people could wear spaghetti strainers in driver's-license photographs.

R'amen.

It was stupid.

It was funny.

It belonged in the day.

Not everything meaningful needed to announce itself with orchestral music.

Sometimes meaning sat beside nonsense at the dinner table.

Eventually the gathering ended.

Romeo left carrying what could reasonably be described as a small treasure hoard of food.

Joey called because he had forgotten something in Romeo's car, requiring a brief navigation adjustment.

Then Romeo headed home.

The sun was setting when he reached the apartment complex.

It was 7:04 p.m. when he parked.

He did not immediately go upstairs.

The apartment was right there.

The food needed to be carried inside.

There was nothing physically preventing him from opening the door and ending the day.

But he stayed in the car.

Outside, the trees moved gently in the wind.

People walked through the complex.

Parents walked with their children.

The light softened as evening settled over everything.

Romeo watched.

And for once, he did not immediately try to turn what he was feeling into a lesson.

He had spent much of his life trying to understand things after they happened.

Sometimes he wrote them down.

Sometimes he talked until the shape appeared.

Sometimes another voice helped him find the word he had been circling without knowing it.

Tonight the word was simple.

He missed them.

He missed the familiarity.

He missed being around Ann and the kids.

He missed his parents.

He missed the feeling of everyone existing in one place without the past requiring explanation.

The admission did not destroy anything.

It did not demand reconciliation.

It did not invalidate the present.

It did not ask him to choose between yesterday and tomorrow.

It was only true.

He missed them.

Perhaps that was why the afternoon had affected him.

For a few hours, he had remembered what it felt like to move inside an old version of home.

And then he drove away from it.

There was warmth in that.

There was sadness in that.

Bittersweet.

Again.

Romeo sat beneath the fading sky and wondered how he had arrived here.

Forty-seven years.

If someone asked him to explain the route, he was not sure he could.

He had made decisions.

He had made mistakes.

He had loved people.

He had lost people.

He had married.

He had divorced.

He had raised children.

He had gone to war.

He had worked.

He had broken.

He had rebuilt.

He had written.

He had somehow become a man who published books and argued with Amazon about whether seventy-five cents was sufficient compensation for a paperback.

He had created characters because they refused to leave him alone.

He had built a website because apparently having books was not enough.

He had turned conversations into journals and journals into stories and stories into physical objects that could end up in his father's hands.

He had not planned most of it.

That was perhaps the strangest part.

Romeo often felt as though he had simply kept moving and things had happened around him.

Then one day he looked backward and discovered a narrative.

As though somebody had been writing while he was busy living.

He did not know whether that was how life worked.

He did not know whether every event had meaning.

He did not know whether there was some elegant explanation connecting every person, every failure, every victory, every parking lot, every book, every love, every goodbye.

He did not have every answer.

For once, perhaps he did not need them.

The trees continued moving.

The sun continued disappearing.

People continued walking home.

Somewhere behind him was an apartment filled with the life he lived now.

Somewhere else were his children.

His parents.

His brother.

Ann.

His father had his book.

JARBIT was waiting to be finished.

There would be another morning.

Another conversation.

Another idea he had not planned.

Another page.

Romeo had not intended to create a journal on his birthday.

But maybe that was precisely why the day deserved one.

Not because August 22 had delivered some enormous revelation.

Not because turning forty-seven had suddenly made him wise.

Not because everything had finally made sense.

The day deserved to be written because it had been ordinary.

And somehow, within the ordinary, he had noticed himself existing.

Not the author.

Not the veteran.

Not the father trying to prove anything.

Not the divorced husband remembering an old life.

Not the federal employee.

Not the man wondering whether strangers would ever buy his books.

Just Romeo.

Sitting inside a parked car while evening arrived.

Alive.

Confused.

Grateful.

Missing people.

Carrying leftovers.

Still creating.

Still wondering.

Still here.

He could not say exactly how he had reached this place.

He could not say where the story would go next.

But on the evening of his forty-seventh birthday, surrounded by everything he understood and everything he still did not, one fact required no explanation at all.

I am here.