I started catching feelings for my friend

Me and this guy have been close for about a year. We started hanging out more one on one recently and something shifted. We'd spend hours talking about everything, the kind of conversations where you look up and it's three hours later and it didn't feel like it. At some point during all of that I started feeling something more and I've been trying to push it down for a few weeks now but it's not going away. The problem is he's straight. There's no version of this where I say something and it goes the way I'd want it to. I don't want to lose what we have and I don't want things to get weird but I also don't know how to just switch this off. I started thinking about what I was actually scared of. Losing the friendship was the big one but there was also something about carrying this completely alone that was making it heavier than it needed to be. I also thought about whether these feelings would pass on their own with time or whether I needed to actually work through them somehow to get to the other side. I realized that keeping it completely to myself wasn't making it easier. Every time we hung out it was just slightly more loaded than it used to be and I was the only one who knew why. I didn't need to tell him. But I needed to tell someone. Just getting it out of my head and into a real conversation felt like it would make it less like something I was trapped with. Talking it through helped me see that I didn't have to do anything dramatic. The friendship was real and worth protecting and saying nothing to him was the right call. But carrying it alone wasn't working. We agreed the best next step was to find one person I trusted enough to tell, not for advice necessarily, just to have someone who knew what I was actually dealing with. That felt like enough to make it lighter without changing anything else.