I Still Exist Part 2

Core Anchor

The relics teach me how to survive.
I Still Exist teaches me why I am worth surviving.

Tonight began after the gym.

I had finished a workout—biceps, back, and shoulders. My body was tired, but I felt accomplished. I had gone into the gym carrying more than weights. I carried questions, memories, fear, hope, love, confusion, and the strange emotional collision of three things that seemed almost ridiculous when spoken beside one another:

Johnlyn.

Pinky.

Pecan pie.

One represented a possibility I barely understood.

One represented a love, a family, a history, and a life for which I had sacrificed so much.

And one represented comfort, humor, and the peculiar way I sometimes keep myself from breaking down when my emotions become too heavy.

I had been listening to the audio conversation created from my journal entry, I Still Exist. Two versions had been generated. I listened to the first one earlier, and I listened to the second while I was working out.

I preferred the second version.

The conversation was clean. It understood the journal. It carried the meaning with greater clarity. It spoke about reconstruction, survival, identity, and the man underneath the wounds.

But listening to it did more than remind me of something I had written.

It confronted me with reality.

It brought back questions that I could not silence with another workout, another journal entry, another promise, or another act of endurance.

While I was in the parking lot after the gym, I began talking to Jarvis.

At first, I did not know what to say.

There were too many things inside my head.

When asked what was on my mind, I could only answer with scattered names and images:

Johnlyn.

Pinky.

Pecan pie.

It sounded almost humorous, but underneath those words was a heart trying to hold several realities at once.

I had just completed a good workout. I should have felt strong. I should have felt clear. Instead, the audio conversation had opened something inside me.

It made me ask a question I did not want to ask:

Am I just fooling myself with Pinky?

I did not ask that because I had stopped loving her.

I asked it because I still loved her.

I asked it because after two years, after all the sacrifices, promises, arguments, reunions, beautiful moments, painful moments, apologies, and attempts to improve, we still seemed to reach the same wall.

There is evidence that both of us have tried.

There is evidence that Pinky has changed certain things.

There is evidence that I have tried to change.

There are peaceful days.

There are loving days.

There are moments when I can feel the hope returning and believe that everything I have done is worth doing.

But then the arguments come back.

The conflict returns.

The same fear appears in another form.

The same pain enters through a different door.

We stop fighting, and I become grateful for the peace. Yet even in the peaceful moments, another question remains:

Why does this keep happening?

Why do we continue returning to the same place?

Why, after two years, do we still find ourselves standing in front of the same emotional wall?

I do not need perfection.

I do not expect a relationship without misunderstanding.

I know that two people from different lives, cultures, histories, experiences, and stages of life will have disagreements.

But there is a difference between ordinary disagreement and a cycle that slowly wears down the heart.

Sometimes I feel like I am giving up—not necessarily leaving, but becoming satisfied with less.

Accepting the absence of conflict as happiness.

Calling temporary quiet peace.

Telling myself that if we are not fighting, then everything must be okay.

But is that truly peace?

Or is it exhaustion?

Is it contentment?

Or is it surrender?

I appreciate the beautiful moments with Pinky. When we are happy, I feel hope. I feel stronger. I feel that all the waiting, sacrifice, and work have meaning.

But I also find myself asking:

How often does that happen?

How often do I feel truly loved, acknowledged, cared for, and important?

How often do I feel emotionally safe enough to rest?

When I was asked what I needed, the answer was simple.

Care.

Acknowledgment.

To feel loved.

To feel that I matter to the person I love.

I was not asking for worship.

I was not asking to become the center of another person’s entire existence.

I was asking for the kind of love that allows the heart to unclench.

The kind of love that says:

You are important to me.

I see what you have done.

I recognize your sacrifices.

I care about what hurts you.

Your heart is safe here.

Those moments give me hope.

They remind me why I keep going.

But the deepest fear beneath all of this is not merely the next argument.

It is losing her.

It is realizing that perhaps we were not meant to remain together.

It is imagining that all of my work, effort, sacrifice, and devotion might not create the future I believed they would create.

It is the fear that everything might become another lesson in life—but a lesson purchased at the highest price I have ever paid.

I am not afraid only of losing a relationship.

I am afraid of losing a history.

I am afraid of losing the meaning I gave to the distance, the flights, the waiting, the saving, the planning, the promises, and the pain.

I am afraid that if the relationship does not survive, I will look backward and wonder whether everything I endured meant nothing.

But perhaps that fear is not telling the whole truth.

A relationship can change without making its history meaningless.

Love can be real even when it is imperfect.

Sacrifice can matter even when it does not purchase the ending we hoped for.

A beautiful moment does not become false because pain followed it.

A painful ending, if one ever comes, does not travel backward through time and erase every sincere act of love that came before it.

Still, the fear is real.

I do not want to lose Pinky.

I love her.

I know that she loves me.

I do not want to lose our family.

I do not want to lose the moments that made the sacrifices worth carrying.

And tonight, while I sat in the parking lot, I remembered why separation frightens me so deeply.

My heart returned to July 2024.

I had come back to the United States after being in the Philippines.

I believe I was in the Dallas airport, waiting for the next flight that would take me back to Washington, D.C.

Everything around me felt sad.

I do not know how to describe the atmosphere except to say that loneliness seemed to follow me wherever I went.

It was in the airport.

It was in the terminal.

It was in the empty spaces between people.

It was in the sound of announcements.

It was in the sight of passengers walking toward their gates.

It was in the chairs.

It was in the windows.

It was in the awareness that every mile of that flight would carry me farther away from where I wanted to remain.

I was heartbroken.

I wanted to stay in the Philippines.

I wanted to be with Pinky.

But I could not stay.

No matter how much I wanted to remain, I knew that I had responsibilities and a life in the United States. I had work. I had children. I had obligations. I had circumstances that could not simply be ignored because my heart wanted something else.

So I returned.

My body was traveling toward one life while my heart remained in another.

That was when life began to feel like a cage.

It felt like a bird being released long enough to experience the sky, only to be captured and returned to an enclosure.

Before freedom, the cage was simply the world.

After freedom, the bird knew what existed beyond the bars.

It knew the size of the sky.

It knew the feeling of movement.

It knew that there was more.

The cage had not necessarily become smaller.

But the bird had become aware of how much larger life could be.

I also imagined a hamster being removed from its enclosure and allowed to explore a much greater space. For one brief period, it experiences a world beyond the walls it had always known.

Then it is placed back inside.

Or perhaps it was like living inside an aquarium—able to see through the glass, able to witness a world beyond the boundaries, but unable to enter it.

I could see the life I wanted.

I could imagine it.

I had touched it.

I had lived inside it briefly.

Then I was placed back into a reality where it could be seen but not reached.

That is what made the pain so severe.

The United States was not literally a cage.

My responsibilities were not meaningless.

My children, work, home, and life here mattered.

But emotionally, I felt trapped in a place where I did not want to be, while the person and life I wanted were thousands of miles away.

I knew there was a larger world.

I knew there was another place where I felt more alive.

I knew there was someone with whom I wanted to build a future.

But I could not simply reach through the glass and enter that life.

I felt depressed.

Not merely sad.

Not simply disappointed.

Every moment felt dark.

Every minute carried weight.

At night, I wanted it to become morning because morning in the Philippines meant Pinky was awake, living her day.

When I was awake during the day, she was often asleep.

Our lives moved in opposite directions across the clock.

When one of us entered the day, the other entered the night.

I found myself wanting to escape my own hours because they represented the time when she was unavailable.

The distance was not measured only in miles.

It was measured in waking and sleeping.

In delayed messages.

In missed moments.

In the helpless realization that the person I loved was living an entire day while I was unconscious, and I was living an entire day while she slept.

It took a long time to move through that darkness.

It took eight or nine months before I was able to return to the Philippines and see her again.

I decided that I would go back in March 2025, whatever happened.

I saved my vacation time.

I saved money.

I prepared because I needed to see her.

I returned around her birthday and stayed for approximately six weeks.

Those weeks were beautiful.

I was with the person I wanted to be with.

I was living, even briefly, in the place where my heart believed it belonged.

During that time, Pinky and I decided to have Sabrina.

We decided to have a baby because we no longer wanted to remain apart.

We wanted to build something that belonged to both of us.

We wanted our love to become a life.

Sabrina was not merely an answer to distance.

She became a real child.

A daughter.

A human life created from a time when Pinky and I looked at the distance between us and said that we wanted more than separation.

She became part of our hope.

When the six weeks ended and I returned to the United States again, the loneliness returned.

It still hurt.

But it was not exactly the same as July 2024.

This time, Pinky was pregnant.

This time, there was another promise between us.

I did not know exactly how or when everything would work, but I knew we were having a child.

I was later able to return and see Sabrina.

I was able to be there when Pinky gave birth.

I was able to experience the arrival of our daughter.

Those moments are not ideas.

They are not fantasies.

They are not pages in a fictional story.

They happened.

They belong to us.

And I do not want to lose them.

I do not want to lose the history that brought Sabrina into the world.

I do not want conflict to turn sacred memories into evidence for one side or another.

I do not want the beauty of what happened to be buried beneath the pain of what is happening now.

That is why the possibility of losing Pinky feels so terrifying.

It is not merely about losing a woman.

It feels like losing the living connection to an entire period of my life.

It feels like losing the person who stood at the center of my hope when I was sitting in an airport feeling that loneliness had followed me across the world.

It feels like losing the woman for whom I saved, traveled, waited, planned, and returned.

It feels like losing the person with whom I decided to create Sabrina.

And I do not want to lose her.

I do not want to lose our family.

I do not want to lose the meaning of what we built.

I simply do not want to keep fighting.

Perhaps that is the clearest truth:

I love her. I know she loves me. I treasure our history. I do not want to lose our family. I just do not want us to keep hurting one another.

At one point in the conversation, I compared my experience to The Matrix.

Not the triumphant part of waking up.

Not the heroic part of discovering the truth.

I thought about the character who discovered that the real world was darker than the reality he had once believed was real.

Inside the Matrix, his life was not perfect. But it gave him purpose, familiarity, and meaning.

Then he was pulled out.

He saw a harsher reality.

He understood that something larger existed, but that knowledge did not make him happy.

Instead, he wanted to return to the illusion without remembering the truth.

That image felt connected to me because sometimes knowledge does not feel like freedom.

Sometimes awareness feels like punishment.

To know that there may be a life where I feel at home does not automatically give me that life.

To know that deeper peace may exist does not immediately create it.

To know what love could feel like can make its absence more painful.

When Jarvis asked what version of myself I wanted to become, I corrected the question.

This was not about who I wanted to be.

I know who I am.

I know the kind of man I want to be.

I know what values I want to carry.

The question was not who.

The question was where.

And with whom.

It is not about who I want to be. I know who I want to be. It is where I want to be—and whom I want to be with.

That correction matters.

I have spent years thinking about identity, strength, honor, survival, discipline, truth, family, protection, and legacy.

I know the man I am trying to become.

But sometimes becoming that man does not answer the loneliness of being separated from the place and people where I feel that man can fully live.

I began to wonder whether this was the beginning of a new chapter.

But if it was a new chapter, why did it feel sad?

Why did it feel lonely?

Why did it feel like I was leaving something important behind?

Perhaps because every new chapter requires the acknowledgment that the previous chapter cannot continue exactly as it has.

That does not necessarily mean leaving Pinky.

It does not mean choosing Johnlyn.

It does not mean abandoning my family or erasing my history.

But it may mean leaving behind an old understanding of love.

For much of my life, I have believed that love is proven through sacrifice.

Love stays.

Love protects.

Love fights.

Love endures.

Love records the truth.

Love stands back up.

Love refuses to abandon the people it has chosen.

Those beliefs shaped the Five Relics.

The relics represent survival.

They describe how I stand.

How I preserve the moment.

How I record what happened.

How I defend myself.

How I protect myself.

How I fight back when necessary.

They form a creed of survival.

They say that I will not allow pain, lies, injustice, betrayal, or hardship to erase me.

They are powerful.

They matter.

They have helped me understand how to remain standing when life tries to knock me down.

But the relics do not fully answer another question:

Why is the man who is standing worth protecting?

They teach the soldier how to survive.

They teach the protector how to guard the gate.

They teach the recorder how to preserve the truth.

But they do not necessarily teach the man inside the armor how to love himself.

The poems Tonight and Distance Between Us also hold great meaning.

They express the heart reaching outward.

They ask how deeply one human being can love another.

They describe longing, beauty, distance, hope, imagination, and the moment another person awakens something inside the soul.

But they also point outward.

Toward a woman.

Toward a memory.

Toward possibility.

Toward love beyond the self.

Even To Explore looks outward, toward the world and what may exist beyond familiar boundaries.

Then there is I Still Exist.

One journal entry.

One simple statement.

But it changes the direction of everything.

The Five Relics point toward defense.

The poems point toward love.

The mission points toward legacy.

But I Still Exist turns the compass around.

It points toward me.

It asks:

What is the value of the one who has been doing all this protecting?

Who has been caring for the man who cares for everyone else?

Who has been guarding Romeo?

For years, Romeo has guarded other people.

He protected his children.

He protected relationships.

He protected memories.

He protected the truth.

He protected the possibility of a family.

He protected the women he loved.

He protected his responsibilities.

He protected his work.

He protected his future.

He protected people even when he was wounded.

He stood at the gate of his own life like a soldier and refused to let everything collapse.

But perhaps he became the guard at the gate instead of the person living inside the home.

Perhaps he spent so much of his life proving how deeply he could love others that he forgot to ask whether he loved the man doing all of that loving.

That realization hurts.

It feels like grief.

I am grieving Romeo.

Not because he is gone.

But because I am realizing how long he has stood in the background of his own life.

I look at what he has done.

The sacrifices he has made.

The flights he has taken.

The money he has saved.

The responsibilities he has carried.

The love he has given.

The arguments he has survived.

The loneliness he has endured.

The times he has been misunderstood.

The times he has made mistakes and still tried to repair them.

The times he has stood back up.

The times he has protected others while barely knowing how to protect his own heart.

The life he has lived is worth more than gold.

Not because it has been perfect.

Not because Romeo has always been right.

Not because every decision has been wise.

But because it is a life.

A life given by God.

A life filled with children, love, sacrifice, service, failure, courage, mistakes, faith, humor, pain, creativity, discipline, responsibility, and hope.

A life that should not be treated as expendable.

I want to love Romeo.

I want that realization badly.

I do not want self-love to remain an idea that sounds profound in a journal entry.

I want to believe it.

I want to feel it.

I want to recognize that Romeo matters—not only because he is a father, provider, veteran, partner, writer, protector, worker, or builder.

He matters before every role.

He matters when nobody is applauding.

He matters when he is alone in an airport.

He matters when the relationship is peaceful.

He matters when the relationship is in conflict.

He matters whether another person chooses him or not.

He matters whether his plans succeed or fail.

He matters because he exists.

And perhaps that is the truth contained in the title:

I Still Exist.

It is not merely an announcement that hardship failed to destroy me.

It is a reminder that the person who survived the hardship is worthy of care.

The relics may teach me how to survive.

But I Still Exist teaches me why I am worth surviving.

One keeps the soldier alive.

The other reaches the man inside the armor.

This does not mean I stop loving Pinky.

It does not mean I stop loving Ann.

It does not mean I stop loving my children.

It does not mean I become selfish, cold, detached, or careless.

Self-love is not emotional abandonment.

It is not removing everyone else from my heart.

It is finally including myself among the people I am responsible for loving.

I still love Ann, Joey and Zach’s mother.

That is an honest truth.

The form of that love has changed.

Our lives changed.

Our relationship changed.

I may no longer be the same man to her that I once was.

But the love did not become meaningless simply because our life together changed.

She is part of my history.

She is the mother of my sons.

She is connected to years of my life that cannot be erased.

And there is something about the way she allowed me to choose that has stayed with me.

She did not decide that my life belonged to her.

She allowed me to make a choice.

She allowed me to decide where my life should go.

She did not erase everything we had.

She did not pretend the history was meaningless.

But she understood that my life ultimately belonged to me.

There may be no greater expression of love than allowing another human being to choose who they want to be and where their life should go.

Not because every choice is painless.

Not because every choice is approved.

Not because freedom removes consequences.

But because love that refuses to allow choice can slowly become possession.

This made me ask whether I have given Pinky the same freedom.

Have I allowed her to choose who she wants to be?

Have I truly seen her as she is?

Have I loved Pinky in the way she deserves to be loved?

Or have I sometimes loved her primarily in the way I wanted to be treated?

Was I loving her?

Or was I loving the connection?

Was I loving the real person in front of me?

Or was I loving the hope that she would become the kind of partner who could heal my loneliness and make me feel secure?

Did I listen to who she was?

Or did I sometimes measure her love by whether she spoke the language of love that I understood?

These questions are difficult because they do not permit a simple verdict.

I cannot honestly say that I never tried to shape her.

I cannot say that fear never entered my love.

I cannot say that my needs never became expectations.

I wanted reassurance.

I wanted acknowledgment.

I wanted visible loyalty.

I wanted to feel chosen.

I wanted her to protect our relationship in the same ways I believed I would protect it.

I wanted her to understand the sacrifices I made.

I wanted her choices to show me that I mattered.

Those desires do not prove that the love was false.

But sometimes they may have made it difficult to distinguish between two very different statements:

This is what I need to feel safe in a relationship.

And:

This is who you must become to prove that you love me.

I may have crossed that line at times.

Fear can disguise itself as protection.

Insecurity can disguise itself as devotion.

Control can disguise itself as concern.

That does not mean all boundaries are control.

It does not mean every concern is wrong.

It does not mean love requires tolerating every action.

But love must leave room for two complete human beings.

Pinky must be free to choose who she is.

And I must be free to decide whether the life created by her choices is healthy for me.

Freedom belongs to both people.

Love can say:

You are allowed to be yourself.

And love can also say:

I am allowed to determine whether who we are together creates peace or destruction.

Allowing someone freedom does not require abandoning boundaries.

Loving someone does not mean agreeing with every decision.

And loving myself does not require controlling the person I love so that I never feel afraid.

Perhaps the better question is not simply:

Did I truly love Pinky?

Perhaps the better question is:

Can I love Pinky as the person she actually is—without controlling her, without abandoning myself, and without pretending that every difference is acceptable?

I believe I did love her.

I believe I still love her.

But I also know that human love is rarely pure in the sense of being untouched by fear, longing, wounds, attachment, and unmet needs.

I loved her deeply.

I may also have loved her fearfully.

I may have loved her through the wounds of previous loss.

I may have loved her while asking her to reassure parts of me that were still afraid of being abandoned.

I may have loved her beautifully in some moments and imperfectly in others.

But imperfect love is still love.

The task is not to condemn everything that came before.

The task is to make the love more honest.

To love without possession.

To care without collapsing.

To commit without disappearing.

To allow freedom without abandoning responsibility.

To establish boundaries without turning them into chains.

To honor another person’s life while also honoring my own.

Johnlyn entered this reflection not because I know her deeply.

I do not.

She is still mostly unknown to me.

There is no relationship.

There is no promise.

There is no shared history.

There is only a smile, a brief encounter, a name, a balcony I believe may be hers, and the warmth my heart felt when I imagined that perhaps something beautiful could exist after the storm.

I know that imagination is not reality.

I know that a person cannot be reduced to a symbol created by someone else’s longing.

Johnlyn is a real person with a real life, choices, history, relationships, and boundaries that I do not yet know.

She may be committed to someone else.

She may never become part of my life.

The moment may remain only a moment.

But what she awakened in me matters.

She represented the possibility that my heart was still capable of warmth.

She reminded me that I could still notice beauty.

She reminded me that despite everything, something inside me still hoped.

When I looked toward what I believed was her balcony, I imagined that perhaps after years of storms, there might be something beautiful that I had not yet seen.

Maybe someday I could be with someone who loved me deeply, and I could return that love with the same depth.

Maybe there could be a relationship where love felt mutual, safe, steady, and free.

That thought brought warmth to my heart.

But perhaps the deeper truth is that Johnlyn did not create that warmth.

She revealed that it still existed inside me.

The capacity to hope was already there.

The capacity to love was still there.

The heart was wounded, but it was not dead.

The imagination may have pointed outward, toward her.

But the life underneath that imagination belonged to me.

That is another reason I Still Exist matters.

The journal is not about choosing Johnlyn over Pinky.

It is not about replacing one woman with another.

It is not about escaping into fantasy.

It is about recognizing that Romeo still possesses a living heart.

A heart capable of beauty.

A heart capable of hope.

A heart capable of love.

A heart that must not be treated as though its only purpose is to be handed to someone else.

And in the middle of all these profound thoughts, there was pecan pie.

I had finished the last pecan pie at home.

I thought about buying another one tomorrow.

Jarvis might have disagreed because of my fitness goals and my cutting phase.

But I announced that I was going to buy more pie anyway.

The truth is that I was talking about pecan pie because I was close to crying.

Humor became the emergency hatch.

I joke in the middle of profound, painful, and deeply emotional conversations because laughter allows me to breathe inside the heaviness.

It does not cancel the sadness.

It does not make the truth less serious.

It creates enough space for me to remain present without being swallowed by what I feel.

Pecan pie became the small ordinary object sitting beside an enormous spiritual realization.

One moment, I was talking about God, sacrifice, self-love, relationships, grief, and the value of my existence.

The next moment, I was declaring my intention to buy pie.

That contradiction is part of me.

I can carry profound thoughts with one hand and pecan pie with the other.

Maybe that is not disrespectful to the moment.

Maybe it is one of the ways life reminds me that sacred truth and ordinary comfort can exist together.

There can be tears and pie.

Faith and humor.

Pain and appetite.

A soul awakening and a man wondering what bakery still has pecan pie.

The humor did not hide the truth forever.

Eventually the truth became clear.

I have spent much of my life guarding, protecting, and fighting for the love of others.

I fought for relationships.

I fought for family.

I fought for my children.

I fought for a future.

I fought against lies.

I fought to preserve memories.

I fought to leave evidence.

I fought to stand back up.

But somewhere inside all that fighting, I forgot to love Romeo.

I forgot that he had also been wounded.

I forgot that he needed tenderness.

I forgot that the man carrying everyone else was still a human being.

I forgot that he was not valuable only because of what he provided.

I forgot that his life was not merely an instrument through which other people could be loved.

That realization brought me to God.

Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself.

He did not say to love your neighbor instead of yourself.

He did not say to erase yourself so that everyone else could feel loved.

The command assumes that the self has value.

Not arrogant value.

Not selfish importance.

Not superiority.

Sacred value.

A person should not worship himself.

But neither should he despise the life God created.

God gave me this life.

Not someone else’s life.

Not a hypothetical life.

Not a life that exists only when another person approves of me.

This life.

Romeo’s life.

God entrusted it to me.

He gave me a body to care for.

A mind to discipline.

A heart to protect.

Talents to develop.

Children to love.

Truths to preserve.

Mistakes from which to learn.

Time that cannot be replaced.

Relationships to honor.

And a soul that does not become worthless when someone else fails to understand it.

When I say:

My life is also something God has asked me to cherish,

I do not mean that God has asked me to place myself above everyone else.

I mean that I am not allowed to treat His creation as worthless simply because that creation is me.

To cherish my life is to recognize its sacred origin.

It is to care for what God has given.

It is to stop treating my own well-being as the first acceptable sacrifice whenever love becomes difficult.

It is to understand that stewardship applies not only to money, family, work, and responsibility.

It applies to my existence.

My life is not mine in the sense that I created it.

But it has been entrusted to me.

And anything entrusted by God should be handled with care.

I cannot claim to honor God while treating the life He gave me as disposable.

I cannot spend every part of myself proving that I love other people and call that faithfulness if, in the process, I destroy the person God also loves.

The cross carries a message greater than my ability to understand.

God considered human life worthy of redemption.

Christ died for people who were imperfect, wounded, sinful, frightened, confused, and still becoming.

That includes me.

Not only Pinky.

Not only Ann.

Not only my children.

Not only the people I have tried to save, protect, forgive, or love.

Me.

Romeo.

If Christ gave His life for me, then I cannot honestly say that my life has no value.

If God has shown mercy to me, I must learn to show mercy to myself.

If God has not abandoned me, I should not abandon myself.

If God continues to call me back after failure, I should not define myself only by the moments in which I failed.

If God cherishes the life He created, then I must learn how to cherish it too.

This does not mean excusing wrongdoing.

Self-love is not self-deception.

It does not say:

I am always right.

It says:

Even when I am wrong, I am still responsible for becoming better rather than destroying myself.

It says:

My mistakes require correction, not self-erasure.

It says:

My wounds deserve healing, not endless punishment.

It says:

My life has value before I accomplish another mission, save another relationship, or prove another point.

God may be asking me to cherish the life He gave me because He knows how easily I spend myself for others.

He knows how quickly I turn love into duty.

He knows how deeply I feel responsible for keeping people, promises, and families together.

He knows that I can survive almost anything while forgetting to ask whether survival alone is enough.

Perhaps He is reminding me:

Romeo, I did not only ask you to protect the people you love.

I also entrusted one of My children to your care.

His name is Romeo.

That child has been standing guard for a long time.

He has worn armor.

He has carried records.

He has built systems.

He has created creeds.

He has written poems.

He has returned after being wounded.

He has protected everyone at the gate.

Now perhaps God is asking him to come home.

Not necessarily to a country.

Not necessarily to a relationship.

Not necessarily to a physical place.

Home within himself.

A place where Romeo does not have to earn his right to exist.

A place where he can acknowledge pain without shame.

A place where he can laugh without pretending.

A place where he can love others without vanishing.

A place where he can be disciplined without hating himself.

A place where he can make mistakes and still believe in redemption.

A place where he does not have to choose between loving himself and loving the people he loves.

Because true self-love does not evict anyone from the heart.

It creates healthier space for everyone.

When I love myself, I do not stop loving Pinky.

I become more capable of loving her honestly.

I can recognize where my fear has shaped my behavior.

I can offer freedom without surrendering boundaries.

I can admit when I am wrong.

I can ask for care without making another person responsible for proving my worth.

I can decide whether the relationship is healthy without turning that decision into a judgment of either person’s entire value.

When I love myself, I do not stop loving Ann.

I can honor what we had without trying to recreate it.

I can appreciate the freedom she allowed me.

I can recognize the history we share through Joey and Zach.

I can allow love to change form without calling it meaningless.

When I love myself, I do not stop loving my children.

I become a father who teaches them that love does not require self-destruction.

I show them that responsibility and dignity belong together.

I show them that strength includes tenderness toward oneself.

When I love myself, I do not need Johnlyn to become the answer to my life.

I can appreciate what the thought of her awakened without turning a beautiful moment into a destiny she never agreed to carry.

I can allow hope to exist without forcing reality to match imagination.

I can recognize that the warmth I felt was evidence that my heart still lives.

When I love myself, I can even eat pecan pie without turning it into either rebellion or shame.

I can make choices honestly.

I can enjoy life.

I can return to discipline without punishment.

I can laugh.

I can be human.

Tonight, I do not have every answer.

I do not know exactly what will happen with Pinky.

I do not know whether our relationship will become more peaceful.

I do not know whether we can break the patterns that continue to hurt us.

I do not know what Johnlyn will ever mean, if anything.

I do not know what the next chapter will contain.

But I know that a new chapter does not have to begin with abandoning someone.

It may begin with refusing to abandon myself.

It may begin with telling the truth:

I love Pinky.

I love Ann in the changed and honest form that remains.

I love my children.

I value my family.

I value my history.

I do not want to lose any of it.

But I also love Romeo.

Or at least I am learning to.

I am learning that his life cannot remain the expendable material from which everyone else’s happiness is built.

I am learning that he is not merely the guard.

He is not merely the soldier.

He is not merely the provider.

He is not merely the writer who preserves everyone else’s story.

He is part of the story.

His happiness matters.

His peace matters.

His body matters.

His faith matters.

His heart matters.

His future matters.

His life matters.

I still exist.

Not only as evidence that I survived.

Not only as a warning that I can fight back.

Not only as a record that I was wounded.

Not only as proof that I stood back up.

I exist as a human being worthy of love.

I exist as a child of God.

I exist as someone entrusted with a sacred life.

And perhaps this is the creed that was missing from the Five Relics.

Not a creed of battle.

Not a creed of defense.

Not a creed built only for surviving the storm.

A creed of sacred life.

A creed that says:

• I will protect the truth, but I will also protect the heart that carries it.
• I will love others, but I will not erase myself to prove that love.
• I will allow others the freedom to choose who they are, and I will honor my own freedom to choose what kind of life I can live in peace.
• I will remember the past without allowing it to imprison the future.
• I will cherish the people God has placed in my life, and I will remember that my own life was also placed into my hands.
• I will not confuse suffering with devotion.
• I will not confuse control with protection.
• I will not confuse silence with peace.
• I will not measure my value by whether another person chooses me.
• I will accept correction without surrendering dignity.
• I will grieve without declaring my life over.
• I will hope without turning imagination into entitlement.
• I will stand back up—not only to return to battle, but to return to myself.

My life is also something God has asked me to cherish.

That sentence changes the direction of everything.

It means that caring for myself is not betrayal.

Rest is not weakness.

Peace is not selfishness.

Boundaries are not abandonment.

Healing is not forgetting.

And loving Romeo does not require him to stop loving anyone else.

It simply means that at last, after years of protecting everyone outside the gate, he turns around and notices the person waiting behind him.

The man who survived.

The man who loved.

The man who failed and tried again.

The man who cried alone in airports.

The man who crossed oceans.

The man who became a father again.

The man who returned for the woman he loved.

The man who stood beside her when their daughter was born.

The man who continued believing even when belief became painful.

The man who carried humor into sadness and pecan pie into philosophy.

The man whose life has been bruised, battered, wounded, and tested.

He is still there.

And he is not asking to become more important than everyone else.

He is asking not to be forgotten.

So tonight, I acknowledge him.

I acknowledge his sacrifices.

I acknowledge his wounds.

I acknowledge the harm he may have caused when fear controlled his love.

I acknowledge the love he gave sincerely.

I acknowledge the things he must still learn.

I acknowledge his desire for peace.

I acknowledge that he cannot force another person to become the answer to his life.

I acknowledge that he does not have to stop loving others in order to return to himself.

I acknowledge that God has not finished with him.

And I say to him:

Romeo, you matter.

Not because you survived.

Not because you provided.

Not because you protected everyone.

Not because you kept the records.

Not because you built a legacy.

Not because someone chose you.

You matter because your life came from God.

You were never meant to be only the shield around everyone else.

You were also someone worth shielding.

You were never meant to be only the arms carrying everyone home.

You were also someone allowed to come home.

You were never meant to be only the heart that loved.

You were also someone worthy of receiving that love from yourself.

Perhaps this is the beginning of a new chapter.

It feels sad because I am grieving all the years I did not understand this.

It feels lonely because no one else can make this realization for me.

Pinky cannot give it to me.

Ann cannot give it to me.

Johnlyn cannot give it to me.

My children cannot give it to me.

Even Jarvis cannot place it inside me.

Others can remind me.

They can love me.

They can reflect my value.

They can walk beside me.

But I must choose not to abandon myself.

That choice is mine.

Maybe that is the freedom Ann once gave me.

Maybe that is the freedom I must learn to give Pinky.

And maybe that is the freedom God has always given me—the freedom to decide whether I will continue treating my life as something merely to spend, or finally receive it as something sacred.

Tonight, I choose to begin receiving it.

Not perfectly.

Not completely.

Perhaps not even confidently.

But honestly.

I still love the people I love.

I still fear losing them.

I still want peace with Pinky.

I still treasure our history.

I still remember the airport.

I still remember the loneliness.

I still remember the six beautiful weeks.

I still remember deciding to have Sabrina.

I still remember returning for her birth.

I still remember the distance.

I still remember the love.

None of that needs to disappear.

But now I will add one truth to all those memories:

I was there too.

Romeo was there.

The man who loved them was also living a life.

His pain mattered.

His joy mattered.

His longing mattered.

His existence mattered.

And his life is also something God has asked him to cherish.

Tonight, I am not leaving love behind.

I am changing its direction.

I am allowing some of the love I have poured into everyone else to return home.

I am not closing my heart.

I am opening one more door inside it.

A door with my own name.

Behind that door is not selfishness.

It is a man who has waited a very long time to be recognized.

A man who is tired of being valued only for what he can endure.

A man who wants to live—not only survive.

A man who wants to love without disappearing.

A man who still believes in God, family, devotion, redemption, humor, beauty, and hope.

A man who can be sad about the past and still walk toward the future.

A man who can admit that he wants another pecan pie tomorrow while simultaneously realizing that his life is sacred.

A man who has guarded the gate long enough.

A man who is finally being invited home.

His name is Romeo.

And he still exists.

◆

Romeo Mesina

The RomNote Project

Source & Citation

Entry Title: I Still Exist Part 2

Subtitle: My Life Is Also Something God Has Asked Me to Cherish

Category: Author/Legacy

Record Type: RNP Journal Entry / Sacred Life / Self-Love / Faith

Written Date: July 16, 2026

Project: The RomNote Project

Author: Romeo Mesina

Public Text Status: The complete written journal is presented on this readable page. The original formatted Word document remains protected through the request-access system.

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