Waiting for the other shoe to drop

I easily see that I have lived a very blessed life.

It wasn't till I was 14 that I even knew anyone that had died and even now, to this day, I have never had to feel any horrible, terrible loss.

I have lived a sheltered and what some might call a perfect life. I have been protected from some of the greater injustices or violences or even just simple losses.

My mother and father are still married, alive, and healthy. All of my siblings, while some were reckless in their younger years, are equally alive and healthy. I've even been dating my first love since, well, since the beginning. The heartbreak I have experienced has been different. Because instead of being tempered by time, acceptance, and moving forward it was, while at times intense and I don't doubt that it was real, it was relatively short lived, it was still within my grasp and slight control, and instead of being weathered through and dissappeared it was healed.

So far, the sound of this seems like there will be a "but" but there is not "but."

I have existed so far in my life in some beautiful bubble. There have been scares and worried but nothing so much as to change my life or truly affect me or even to slightly affect me.

I don't want that to change. I don't want that to change ever.

And with things going the way they are, with mortality ever pending and change ever looming, I feel this stressing need to face it. Face that there could be hurt in ways I have yet to experience. I'm scared.

Plenty of people face plenty of hard things every day. But I have not. I completely understand that my existance has met practically no adversity.

What if I'm not strong enough? If I'm too weak? What if I cannot rise to the occassion? What if I just can't do it? What if I can't do it?

So many times people have met negative situations with grace and kept something vital within themselves alive and well. What If I cannot do this?

Sometimes it feels like the whole world is tumbling down and the debris is finally threatening to fall upon me as well, to break me from this protection, and I'm here, waiting, anxious and afraid, looking up bricks and bodies and hopes and dream fall down around me, saying over and over, "Please not this time. Please do not let this fall upon me. Please not this time."