Where to go from here?

Well, the Mississippi house is now back on the market and cleaner than it's ever been; Miranda hadn't stopped cleaning it until everything was gleaming and smelled good. The hardwood floors even got oiled. The windows were shining like diamonds. Everything was perfect when she left it, and a voicemail to the realtor saying "Start showing it again" had been left. That was last week, and the place probably still smelled lemony.

With a few vacation days left, she'd gone back to Tampa, quietly. Back to the little apartment where she'd been installed, more or less, by Ted, and the cleaning jag continued until there was nothing left to clean. She'd then started going through her belongings into donate/trash piles. She donated two huge trash bags of clothes to the charity bin in the supermarket parking lot and threw a lot of her stuff out.

It's like she had a purpose. The cleaner she could leave things, and the more she could get rid of, the better. Almost like erasing her footprints from these places. Keeping *this* busy also did not allow her the luxury to dwell on what might have been, what could've been, and what is. She'd lost 13 lbs. since the beginning of her vacation, and this can be attributed to the nonstop activity since the day before New Year's Eve.

She's avoided her cellphone, shutting it off, actually, for long stretches. This is more to duck her mother than anybody else, because it's not like work will need her. She's not that high up on the food chain within Corporate where they'd call her to come in on time off. And her dad knows that sometimes she needs her space, and it's better to have the phone shut off entirely than to think (hope?) Ted might call.

She made a hair appointment for early Sunday morning and got her usual, as well as some tasteful, well-placed highlights, and got her nails done as well. Normally, she doesn't bother with her nails but when returning to work from a vacation, she wanted to look her best. She also wanted to look good for job interviews.

Yeah..that. She's been trolling monster.com and filling out applications with a vengeance. She hasn't told a soul about it. She knows that if worse came to worse, her dad would find a spot for her in his company, but that's something she'd rather do as a last resort. She's told no one that she's thinking about resigning from her job with WWE, because she doesn't want to discuss it. She doesn't want to admit it to herself, either, that she's equating a failed marriage with self-worth, and that she'd accept a far lower paying spot if it means not working somewhere where she'd have to keep up the facade of "everything being okay."

It's not okay. She's her own worst enemy, and her own worst critic, but she's not going to point fingers. She'd had something of a revelation at that arena in Jersey, and decided that yeah, she'd have to let him go. She does love him that much so as not to want to keep the destructive cycle going.

Doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. Doesn't mean she's not checking her email every half hour to see if there are responses to her applications. She's selected email as her preferred contact, and maybe she's undermining herself by keeping the phone off more than not, but she doesn't want to think about things too much.

She's got a tab open on Craigslist looking at rentals, too. With as much as she's thrown away, she could just make one trip somewhere, loading her car with her stuff, rather than carrying excess crap she didn't need.

She just doesn't know where to go from here. That's the problem. She's returning to work this week, so to try and fit in a move while keeping up appearances at work...that won't happen. The move will have to wait until a couple of weeks from now, when she has back to back scheduled days off and has once again gotten back into the swing of things at work. She could just move in with her father..but again, LAST resort. She doesn't want to admit the failure. Not even to herself.

Not yet.

She found her eye catching on THIS AD , although the fourth pic from the bottom had...something on the floor that she didn't even want to know what it was. Oh well, she'll call when she gets home later in the week, but that might be it.