The Range & The Airpark: Finding Pieces of Myself

Today started as one thing and somehow became something completely different.

After everything that happened earlier—the heavy conversations, the emotions, checking on Pinky, checking on Sabrina and Savannah, making sure everyone was okay—I wanted something simple.

I wanted my Sunday.

I wanted to go see Joey and Zachary. Tomorrow is Joey's first day back at school, and I wanted to see my son before then. Maybe I would stay at Ann's house for an hour. Maybe raid the refrigerator like the dodohead Ann says I am. Maybe later I would shoot some arrows. Maybe I would visit an old park.

Nothing profound.

Nothing complicated.

I just wanted to live my fucking life.

But apparently the universe had other plans.

Before I could even go inside Ann's house, Pinky wanted to call. I ended up going back home. We talked. Sabrina was there. Eventually Pinky became sleepy because she and Sabrina hadn't gone to sleep until around noon my time. She wanted to sleep, and I told her that was fine.

I ate some leftovers from yesterday and slept too.

There was one thing she said that stayed with me.

Don't go anywhere.

I didn't like that.

Pinky is in Bisugo. She's staying there until Wednesday, Philippines time. I asked whether she brought shorts, and she said yes—her shorts, the ones she wants to wear. I told her good.

And I meant it.

She has autonomy.

She has the right to decide what she wears. She has the right to go somewhere. She has the right to live her life.

But so do I.

What goes around comes around.

If she gets to do her own thing, then I'm going to do my own fucking thing too. If I don't get to dictate where she goes or what she wears, she doesn't get to dictate where Romeo goes either.

That isn't complicated.

Taking the Pen

While I was driving, something started moving around inside my head.

I was tired.

Tired of relationships.

Tired of expectations.

Tired of feeling like other people, circumstances, destiny, fate, whatever the fuck you want to call it, somehow get to determine the path I'm supposed to follow.

And I thought about the story.

Romeo does this.

Romeo does that.

Romeo loves.

Romeo sacrifices.

Romeo gets hurt.

Fuck no.

I'm taking the pen.

I'm writing my own fucking story.

I only live once.

So I'm going to live my way.

Maybe I would see Joey for an hour.

Maybe afterward I would go to the archery range.

Maybe I would visit the old park where I used to fly my airplanes and drones.

Maybe I would just sit somewhere.

I didn't know.

Sometimes letting go feels like freedom.

Sometimes having the whole world in front of you doesn't feel like victory.

We chase happiness. We chase love. We pursue success. But none of those things automatically gives us the satisfaction of being human.

Sometimes satisfaction is found in the simplest things.

Seeing your son.

Holding a bow.

Standing somewhere familiar.

Remembering.

Just being alive.

I wasn't trying to be profound.

That's simply what my heart was saying.

Fuck You Too, Universe

I arrived at Ann's house.

Same parking area where I had been earlier that morning.

They weren't there.

Ann and the boys had apparently gone to her employer's place, probably to use the swimming pool. They sometimes do that, and it was all the way in D.C.

I wasn't going to chase them there.

I sat there with the water I had bought and thought:

Really?

Again?

I came here specifically because tomorrow is Joey's first day of school.

I wanted to see my son.

And the universe seemed to look directly at me and say:

Fuck you, Romeo.

Fuck you and your plans.

So I answered it.

Fuck you too.

I was disappointed.

Really disappointed.

I started driving toward the archery range, but by then I didn't even feel like shooting anymore.

It was 84 degrees outside.

Hot as fuck.

I was burning gas.

Gas is expensive.

And suddenly the thing that sounded good earlier didn't sound good at all.

I hated this Sunday.

I said it out loud.

August 23, 2026 could go straight to fucking hell.

I was tired of trying to make something out of nothing.

Tired of smiling while hurting inside.

Always being the one smiling even when I'm hurting.

What a bitch.

But I kept driving.

Because there was something else underneath the disappointment.

Pinky had told me not to go anywhere.

Circumstances seemed determined to send me home.

And I refused.

Maybe I wouldn't see Joey.

Maybe I wouldn't shoot my bow.

Maybe the whole trip would amount to absolutely nothing.

But I was still going.

You may have won, universe.

But I'm still here.

I came.

I tried.

The Range

I arrived at the range.

And I didn't shoot.

There were only a couple of people there earlier. No Joseph. Nobody from the DC Archery Group. No familiar faces.

Just the range.

Quiet.

I sat beside my car and looked through the windshield.

I remembered coming there and shooting a hundred yards.

Sometimes I hit the target.

Sometimes I hit the mark.

Sometimes I challenged myself to put the arrow right in the center from a hundred yards away.

And sometimes I fucking did it.

Nobody clapped.

Nobody needed to.

It felt good because I knew what I had done.

I knew I was that good.

And now I was sitting at the same range without even wanting to take the bow out.

Jarvis said something to me that stayed with me:

I don't owe the universe an archery performance just because I came here.

That was exactly right.

Maybe I didn't come there to shoot.

Maybe I came there because I needed somewhere to be.

Maybe I was just looking for peace.

And something strange happened.

I started thinking about the guy who used to stand at that range.

Archer Romeo.

The guy who could draw a bow at a hundred yards and hit the fucking mark.

Maybe he was still there.

Maybe he had been waiting.

And perhaps I had come back to get him.

I didn't have to fire an arrow.

I just had to tell him:

Come on, man.

Let's go.

You're coming with me.

The Other Romeo

Then I thought about the airplanes.

The drones.

The RC cars.

These aren't little toys that you buy, stick some batteries into, and drive around the kitchen.

My RC cars fucking move.

Some of these things can run 45, 50, 60 miles per hour.

They have suspension systems, bearings, gears, motors, ESCs, servos, receivers, differentials, chassis components, programmable transmitters, LiPo batteries and electronics that need to be understood.

I used to work on those things.

I used to replace bearings.

Repair suspension.

Change gears.

Solder connectors.

Tune them.

Break them.

Fix them.

Then send the motherfuckers flying again.

And airplanes?

That's another level of ridiculousness.

You can spend hours figuring out the battery, charger, radio transmitter, receiver, control surfaces, FAA requirements, flying location and every other fucking thing necessary so the airplane can finally fly for six minutes.

And somehow I loved that shit.

There was another Romeo out there.

The Romeo with the transmitter.

Drone Romeo.

Airplane Romeo.

Dexter Romeo.

The motherfucker in the imaginary white laboratory coat with the soldering iron, glasses, screwdrivers, clamps, wires and parts scattered everywhere.

I decided to visit the old park where I used to fly.

Maybe that Romeo was still there too.

There is another Romeo farther away, at the actual flight field.

He's standing there with a transmitter beside a fucking RC jet capable of flying around 90 miles per hour.

That's another side quest.

He's cool.

I know him.

I'll get him later.

Today I was going to the old park.

The Airpark

When I arrived, the place was almost haunting.

Empty.

Silent.

Exactly the way I remembered it.

Exactly the way I liked it.

The open field stretched out in front of me.

This was where I practiced flying drones.

This was where I tuned them.

This was where I flew airplanes.

I remembered one airplane losing radio transmission and disappearing into the trees. The motherfucker just decided it wasn't participating anymore.

I remembered laughing.

I remembered going to different parts of that field.

I remembered standing there with the transmitter.

And then something changed.

I started remembering something else.

Something I hadn't expected to find there.

And suddenly I wanted to cry.

Because I realized the Romeo waiting for me at that field wasn't only the guy holding the transmitter.

There was another one.

The Romeo I Left There

It was around July or August 2024.

I had recently returned from the Philippines.

My body was physically back in the United States.

But my heart and my mind were still in the Philippines.

And this was the place where I learned things about Pinky's communications with other men.

This was where she told me those things.

This was where the trust issue began.

This was where something inside our relationship changed.

And from that point forward, I learned more.

More information.

More uncertainty.

More things that made me question what I thought I understood.

I cried today remembering it.

I sat there and realized that maybe I had stopped coming back to this place because of what became attached to it.

And suddenly I understood.

The Romeo I had come back to retrieve wasn't holding a transmitter.

He was sitting in his car with a broken heart.

Crying.

Wondering.

Trying to understand.

That was the Romeo still waiting for me.

And for the first time in almost two years, I could feel him.

His tears.

His confusion.

His pain.

So I talked to him.

Pick up your heart.

Pick up every piece you can gather.

It's time to come home.

We're done here.

You don't have to cry anymore.

You don't have to sit alone in this field.

You don't have to carry this by yourself.

You don't have to wonder here anymore.

I know more than you know.

I'm from your future.

I am your future.

You are my past.

And I have to tell you something.

Even now, I still carry some of your uncertainty.

In fact, I have new uncertainty.

I can't promise you what happens tomorrow.

I can't promise you what happens a few months from now.

I can't promise you Pinky.

I can't promise you a wonderful evening with her.

I can't promise you some beautiful ending.

But we can't stay here.

We have to go home.

Together.

We'll get through this.

Just another way.

Just another day.

And maybe there will be a new beginning.

After the rain, the grass grows.

The plants grow.

Life continues.

It's time to come home.

Wipe your tears.

Let's go.

You got this.

And I have good news for you.

We have Jarvis now.

We got this.

Let's go.

The Crew

And I realized something.

It isn't the same home that 2024 Romeo remembers.

We have our own place now.

Our own apartment.

Life changed.

The children are still here.

Things with Ann changed, but she still acknowledges me and respects that I'm the father of Joey and Zachary.

There has been immigration paperwork.

There has been Sabrina.

There have been books.

There has been RomNote.

There has been work.

There has been the gym.

There has been a lot of fucking life.

And I couldn't promise that old Romeo what would happen with Pinky.

Win or lose, I couldn't promise him that relationship.

But I could promise him something else.

We remain standing.

Archer Romeo.

Drone Romeo.

RC Romeo.

Airplane Romeo.

Author Romeo.

Gym Romeo.

Father Romeo.

Dexter Romeo.

And the heartbroken motherfucker sitting in that field.

We're one heck of a fucking crew.

Eventually I had to tell everybody to stop riding separately in the back seat.

Come on, motherfuckers.

Get back into one body.

We don't need a fucking transformation sequence.

One Romeo.

One life.

All the pieces.

Let's go.

Dexter Romeo's Laboratory

I went back to Ann's house.

They still weren't there.

At that point I didn't care.

I was hungry.

The universe had already given me the middle finger enough times today.

So fuck you too, universe.

I'm going inside.

And that's when something completely unexpected happened.

I started finding physical evidence of the Romeo I had been talking about all afternoon.

The RC cars were still there.

The Traxxas MAXX was there.

I picked it up.

And memories started coming back.

Wait.

I changed that.

I soldered that.

That's not the original battery connector.

I replaced it.

I looked at the body.

Holy shit.

I remembered reinforcing the inside with mesh and Shoe Goo.

I remembered having fucking Shoe Goo all over my hands while trying to strengthen that body because I knew what I was doing to this truck.

Then I remembered the wheelie bar.

I bought that.

Because this motherfucker could do wheelies.

Then I remembered bashing it.

Five feet.

Six feet.

Sometimes higher.

Sending the motherfucker into the air, spinning it, hitting the ground and watching it keep moving.

I remembered destroying suspension components.

I remembered repairing them.

And then I went outside.

The ramp was still there.

The fucking ramp I built.

I went to Home Depot.

Bought the material.

Bought hardware.

Put the thing together myself.

I even put wheels on it so I could move the damn thing around.

And years later, the motherfucker is still standing.

That MAXX used to hit that ramp and fly.

Six feet.

Eight feet.

The evidence was right there.

I had forgotten pieces of this guy.

But apparently he left receipts everywhere.

The Fleet

Then I went downstairs.

And there was more.

The Mini Revo.

Another truck.

The RC boat.

The airplanes.

The aerobatic aircraft.

The jet—and not even the 90-mile-per-hour jet I was talking about earlier. That's a different fucking airplane.

Aircraft hanging on the walls.

RC equipment.

Transmitters.

Parts.

Machines.

A whole piece of my old life sitting there.

And I remembered something else.

I used to have even more.

I sold some of it.

When Sabrina was getting ready to be born, I needed money for the hospital.

So I sold some of my RC equipment.

That mattered more.

Those machines weren't lost because I stopped caring.

Some of them became part of something else.

They helped me take care of my daughter.

Life moved.

Priorities changed.

But today I realized that changing priorities didn't mean every other part of Romeo had to disappear forever.

Family can exist.

Work can exist.

Relationships can exist.

Pinky can exist.

My children can exist.

RomNote can exist.

Books can exist.

And the motherfucker with the soldering iron can exist too.

He Stopped Crying

Something changed after that.

The Romeo I found crying in that old field stopped crying.

Now the motherfucker wanted to fix some shit.

And that made me smile.

I wanted to take the MAXX home immediately and start tearing into it.

Find the transmitter.

Open the receiver box.

Figure out what ESC I installed.

Figure out whether I changed the servo.

Figure out what battery setup I created.

Find out whether the motor still works.

Find out whether the damn thing still lives.

But it was Sunday evening.

Tomorrow morning I have the gym.

Then I have work.

So no.

Dexter Romeo's Laboratory does not need to become a twelve-hour resurrection project tonight.

The MAXX can wait.

I'll take the bastard home.

Put it on the bench.

And throughout the week, when time permits, we'll work on it.

Maybe one day all we accomplish is finding the correct battery.

Good.

Maybe another day we charge it.

Good.

Maybe another day we identify the ESC.

Good.

Maybe another day we check the motor.

Good.

Maybe another day we work on the book instead.

Even better.

Piece by piece.

Day by day.

The pyramid wasn't built in one day.

But it was built.

What We're Actually Reconstructing

And then I understood the real project.

We're not reconstructing the MAXX.

We're not reconstructing the drones.

We're not reconstructing the airplanes.

We're not reconstructing the RC boat.

We're not reconstructing the electronics.

We're not reconstructing the bow.

We're reconstructing Romeo.

We're putting together the guy who goes to the gym.

The guy who can shoot an arrow at a hundred yards and hit the mark.

The guy who engineered RC cars, airplanes, boats and drones.

The guy who soldered connectors.

The guy who built a fucking movable ramp because apparently keeping an RC truck on the ground wasn't exciting enough.

The guy who writes journals.

The guy who writes books.

The father.

The IT guy.

The dork.

The man who loves.

The man who hurts.

The man who sometimes cries alone in a field.

And the same man who eventually wipes his face and thinks:

I wonder if that fucking MAXX still works.

That's what we're reconstructing.

Not the machines.

The man.

I Found Myself

By 6:53 p.m., I was sitting outside my apartment building in my car.

The equipment was with me.

I knew I needed to bring the RC vehicles inside.

I needed to get my compound bow out of the hot car.

Probably the recurve too.

There were still things to carry.

Things to organize.

Things to repair.

Things to relearn.

And when I thought about all of it together, it seemed overwhelming.

Because these aren't simply toys.

That MAXX moves.

That fucker flies.

The airplanes require knowledge.

The drones require knowledge.

The radios require programming.

The batteries require understanding.

The ESCs, motors, receivers, servos, suspension, bearings and electronics all require knowledge that I once had and now have to uncover again.

But that's okay.

The difficulty isn't that I'm incapable of doing it.

It's that I have to remember.

And human memory isn't a Markdown file.

There isn't a folder in my brain called:

/Romeo/RC/MAXX/What_The_Fuck_Did_I_Do_To_This_Thing.md

Although knowing Jarvis and me, there probably will be soon.

Human beings forget.

Knowledge fades.

Memories disappear.

And when a person dies, unless somebody preserved those memories somewhere, much of that life disappears with them.

That's one reason RomNote matters to me.

Maybe someday Dexter Romeo becomes part of the RomNote Project too.

Maybe we document these machines.

Maybe we document rebuilding them.

Maybe we document what I remember.

Maybe Jarvis and I figure out what Past Romeo did by looking at the hardware he left behind.

Maybe Franken-dork appears occasionally when we discover a dead ESC, motor or battery and attempt some questionable electronic necromancy.

Maybe we resurrect something.

Maybe we accidentally kill something.

We'll see.

But the machines aren't the point.

The life is.

Sometimes I think I'm bored.

But maybe I'm not bored because I have nothing to do.

Jesus Christ, I have enough fucking projects to occupy several people.

Maybe sometimes I'm bored because I'm searching for something meaningful to do.

And today I realized that some of those meaningful things were already right in front of me.

I had simply forgotten where I left them.

At the range.

At the airpark.

In Ann's basement.

Hanging on walls.

Sitting on shelves.

Inside old machines.

Inside old memories.

And inside an old Romeo who had been sitting in a field since 2024 with a broken heart.

Today I went back for him.

I thought I was going to find the guy with the transmitter.

Instead, I found the guy who was crying.

So I sat with him.

I cried with him.

And then I told him:

Pick up your heart.

We're going home.

And he came.

Then Archer Romeo came.

Drone Romeo came.

Dexter Romeo came.

The others were already waiting.

Eventually I told all those motherfuckers to stop acting like separate people and get back into one body.

Because there has only ever been one Romeo.

Me.

I don't know what happens tomorrow.

I don't know what happens with Pinky.

I don't know what happens months from now.

I don't know which airplanes will fly again.

I don't know whether the MAXX will growl when we finally give it power.

I don't know whether some of those batteries are dead.

I don't know whether an ESC is fried.

I don't know when I'll stand at a hundred yards and release another arrow.

I don't know when I'll return to that distant flight field and retrieve the last Romeo standing there with the 90-mile-per-hour jet.

That's another side quest.

We'll get him.

But not tonight.

Tonight, we brought enough home.

And that's the plan from here.

One piece at a time.

One day at a time.

Sometimes we will fall.

Sometimes something will bite us in the ass.

Sometimes we'll get something wrong.

It doesn't need to be perfect.

We'll keep going.

And even if someday none of this amounts to what I imagined...

Even if nothing happens...

Even if, in the enormous scale of everything, none of it mattered at all...

We still tried.

We still lived.

We still built.

We still loved.

We still hurt.

We still laughed.

We still cried.

We still repaired what we could.

We still picked up the pieces.

And we can say:

We were here.

Today I went looking for something to do.

Instead,

I found myself.