"are you scared?"

those are the words a three year old uttered to me today. an intense, emotional, lovely three year old, whom i've known since she was born. if you don't know anything about three year olds, let me tell you this: they don't ask if you're scared. they don't think about how other people operate that way. a three year old is still, developmentally, the center of their own universe and the idea that another human being has emotions and experiences, independent of anything involving them, is hard to access.

but, amidst my casual tales of leaving, not meant to scare, but inform them, she asked.

are you scared?

so i said, confidently, also not to scare them, yes.

i am fucking scared.

today i said my first real goodbye-- my first i will see you again i don't know when-- which looked a lot like talking, laughing, drinking beer, eating various items made of carbohydrates drenched in cheese, and then occasionally holding hands across the table in wistful declarations of bay area love that has spanned more than a decade. it was easy and beautiful and just what i expected and needed.

i felt perfectly composed until 95 seconds before we reached the bart station, where i was depositing her to send her back to her native east bay. at this moment in time, immediately after asserting how i was either so totally cool and composed about moving or so far immersed in disbelief that i was not processing anything, she began crying. and then i, without hesitation or restraint, also began crying, and failed to stop. i failed to stop throughout the subsequent hugging, the ride in a too-hastily-arriving lyft to the tenderloin, the arrival to a cafe/ bar in the tenderloin, or the 10-12 minutes i locked myself in the bathroom of said tenderloin cafe/bar, which smelled aggressively like pee and the floor of which was either covered in excess sink water or the exact pee that was permeating my nose and tear-stained eyeballs.

i failed to stop as i left the cafe/ bar and walked down the hideous streets of the tenderloin, abandoning my cause of meeting other friends and casually pretending i was walking to cool myself down before again entering a lyft, tear-filled and absent of composure, but really walking in the exact direction of my best san francisco friend, who lives two blocks away and with whom i'd be texting the entirety of my rapid and total descent into insanity.

she was, as any good best friend would be, walking up the street to me at the exact time i was so unintentionally approaching her house. she smushed me in her arms, let me cry, patted my back, and invited me up to her house to allow me to further cry in privacy.

we talked some manner of words, which went on for about an hour, and at the end, i felt not terrible.

the truth is, i can collect words to say about this thing or that. i can talk about my nerves about arriving in louisville and what will happen-- how i will occupy my time, how i will afford rent or the $8 cups of individually-brewed african coffee to which i've become accustomed, where specifically i will live, what it will feel like to be without girlfriends in any given moment, how the change in weather will affect my skin, hair, and general demeanor, what a contrast the political climate might be to my accustomed surroundings, how i feel about leaving so many people i've loved so intensely for so long, the pressures that are added to a relationship by making such enormous leaps so early, and blah blah blah blah blah until my mouth literally aches from moving.

but the truth is, the truth is, that i am simply overwhelmed and scared.

i wish that statement not to detract from the concurrent, unmitigated, total, life-shaking, unfathomable thrill i feel at so soon getting to live in the same place as a man i infinity percent love. because i infinity percent love him and, in many senses, cannot wait to bust out of this city and throw myself in his arms and make out in every corner of louisville and see that stupidly perfect face every morning and hold hands on every street and move through the seasons together and laugh and bound and touch and even get sick and frustrated and lose sometimes, but generally disgust every person around me with how emphatically i infinity percent love this man.

i wish it not to detract from that. because that is its own, total, total, total thing.

that is its own whole heart. it takes up its own whole heart. it takes up a heart that's existed for a hundred years.

but then there are all the other feelings. there are all the feelings i mentioned before. the what will happens and the what ifs and the how will it feels and the truth is i just don't know. and i've spent a lot of time knowing. i've spent a really fucking long time with everything mostly planned out and it scares me not to know. plain and simple. and it scares me that i'll be there and i won't be able to casually walk down my friend's street, knowing she'll scoop me up.

again, it's that, but it's not that.

it's just everything. it's nine million infinity percent feelings and they are erupting out of me violently and once they start, they don't stop.

the truth is that the idea of moving has also moved every single feeling that ever existed inside my body and brain and toenails and they are now all so agitated that they are exploding out of me without restraint.

the truth is, if you see me in the next two weeks (or month or months or years or lifetime probably), i will probably cry all over you, and please don't take that to mean anything other than i am a girl, who has soaked up so much of the world around me that some of it is bound to leak out of my eyes now and again, if not every moment that i exist.

and i'm getting to be okay with that. i'm getting to be okay with a lot of things that seem weird, but end up just being life moving through me and what is life if not the living of and expression of it.

so here i am. living at infinity percent.

this is a blog about moving for a boy. this is a blog about living at infinity percent. this is a blog about tearful, bursting, overflowing, hyperbolic, all-the-way me.