Friendship or something more?

I am going to keep this brief. I have trust issues, and I am also a very shy, introverted person. I was in love with my best friend (I'll call him John) all though-out high school and I know that I acted like a fool to try and get him to give me an indication that he liked me back. We had four years of great friendship. Then when we both left for university, I went to one that was 7 hours away from John. A couple weeks after school started we got into a huge fight. I stopped texting him, afraid that I would make things worse and ruin our friendship. When we saw each other at thanksgiving, we patched things up while we were both home, but ran into problems again when we left and I stopped replying to his "hey" messages because I was afraid of getting hurt and taking the brunt of the blame. I sent him one long message explaining this and I didn't hear from him again for a while. Then, about a year after we stopped talking, I sent John a drunk message telling him how much I missed him and had wanted to contact him many times over the last year, but that I understood if he hated me since I was the one who broke off the conversations. He told me that he was to blame as well and that he missed me too. He told me that he stopped trying to contact me because he was afraid of getting hurt as well. So we have been talking since then and everything has gone back to normal. Unfortunately, I think that my feelings have also returned, or that they never truly left. I find myself thinking of him all the time. As a side not, there were two guys that I tried seeing in the year that John and this guy weren't talking and the reason I ended things with both of them, after no more than a handful of dates was because I kept comparing them to John and finding that they didn't measure up. So now I don't know what to do. I don't want to lose this friendship again by telling him I have feelings for him because it sent me into a downward spiral that I am still finding my way out of, but I don't know if I can sit back and pretend that I am only have platonic feelings for the guy either. What should I do? Leave it and move on, finding someone new or do I tell him and accept that if I get rejected our friendship will never be the same? Thanks

I certainly understand the fears that you have going into this. I think that the best thing you can do is try to sit him down and have a conversation about it. Start with making a set of rules for you guys to follow when talking like 'no yelling' or talking in turns so that one person does not get cut off, and making sure that you both are approaching this with an open mind. Even if nothing obvious comes of it, it will be really healthy for the both of you to get all of this out onto the table so that you can deal with it rather than bottle it up to explode in a fight later.