I just picked up a phone…

I just picked up a phone message (left many hours ago) from a friend, worried that she'd done something to upset me. I'll talk to her soon, but I figured if I'd inadvertently worried her, I'd maybe worried other people who wouldn't actually ask me if they'd upset me, so it was best to broadcast a response here, in the hopes that any such friends (and any who might feel that way in the near future) would then know better than to worry.

Did that make any sense?

The truth is that I'm not just very busy, though I am that.

The truth is that I'm a little sad, a little scared, and sometimes that spills over into interactions with my friends. I've been scared ever since last February, March, April -- whenever it was that Kevin asked me to move in here, to get back together with him. First scared that it was going to be hard (which it has been, off and on -- that's the sad part, in the down times when things aren't working well), but then, when it became clearer to me that I could probably deal with the hard parts, more overwhelmingly scared that even if we do good day-to-day now, living together, we still might not find a way to make our long-term incompatibilities work. And that at some point, maybe end of this year, maybe end of the next one, but at some point too damn soon for my tastes even if it is a year or two away, we'll have to give up, call it off. And the longer I live here (the more I get accustomed to being here, to this home, to his ways -- the more I love him) the more scared I get.

It's a bit of a catch-22; we need the time to figure out if we can make this work...but the more time we take, the more difficult this interim state becomes.

So that's the scoop. I'm here, I'm productive, I'm getting very comfortable in a lot of ways. I'm actually loving living in Chicago so far -- making friends, hooking up with old friends. Driving through the city at night is surprisingly exhilarating. Visiting Hyde Park whenever I feel like it and pretending to be an undergrad again. Being mistaken for an undergrad on occasion. :-) Living off Kevin financially and using what money comes in to claw my way out of credit card debt is also lovely. His company is very pleasant. When things are good between us, I'm blissfully happy. Astonishingly so. And at the same time, undernearth, I'm always a little terrified that it won't last.

It's like standing there, waiting for a punch that's going to land in your gut and knock all the wind out of you. Not to mention hurting like bloody hell. Forcing yourself to keep standing there.

Guess I'm not as good at living in the moment as I always thought I was.