Somewhere Unfamilar

Johnno fell down the stairs tonight. It was an accident and my fault--we were throwing out parts of our halloween costume and I took him out a different way than nomral and he couldn't see.

My heart stopped.

It was one of those loud and heavy falls where you just eat the pavement and all you can do is just take a second and ctach your breath. But I felt my heart freeze up because I heard the sound and didn't see it and when I turned around I felt myself just go stone cold. I was almost sick.

But he is fine--he dusted himself off before standing--and yet I felt as if everything wasn't.

I have been dealing with a lot of my crazies as of late--jobs and friends and money and art and a million small cracks in the looking glass--and this just shook me up more. I don't think I knew until recently how poorly I handle change because I am so good at chaos that I just kept associating the two when they are not the same. Chaos is fast and in your face, it requires quick thoughts and snappy wit or reflexes and candor but change, true change, is slow and small and creeps in behind the scenes. It replaces each part of the stage until the scene is different while chaos is like a fire or a tidal wave that just happens and you have to fight to stay above it.

But the most crazy thing is the boy. Everytime I think I have a grasp on what I feel about him and where it could be going (Thanks Sex In The City for that) I find myself somewhere new and different. Having him fall in front of me made me so upset and the depth of that feeling took my breath away. I actually had to hold on to him for a moment until I could believe he was okay and thus taken in air again. We walked hand in hand back to is car and hugged a bit longer before he drove off.

And as I headed back in I wondered if I had felt this deeply before. He is not the first boyfriend, not the first time I used the love word, not my only prospect for the future and yet it feels different. But then I wondered if that was genuine because every time I have given my heart, on some level, I have believed that to be the case. And yet, once you break up and go through all the shit and the strife and the drama and depression somehow that feeling ends up being boxed away. Sometimes it is the friend's box--that you can still make room in your life for each other--and other times it's the box you leave on the curb--for the trash collector.

But I am being to see that it is more than that. That Johnno means so much to me that for a moment tonight my world stood still at the end of him not being in it. This has never happened before, never been that shaken by something so throughly, and I did not like the novelty of this feeling.

And it made me realize that I have been making myself too crazy when it comes to us. That on some level, it is enough for him to be in my world because the idea of him not being there makes mine cease to exist. I don't know who or what this makes me outside of changed.

Maybe there is something to that.