... I come here.

I'm feeling empty- again- and I'm seeing that free space become filled with anger and fidgetyness and over all crank.

I will not, I must not give into this... darkness. Yea, I said it. I'm my old melodramatic self again. How can I not be? It's so hard to look at this world. to the see the injustices- large and small- and to still solider on.

Sometimes, I just don't want to be flexible. Sometimes, I want to be staunch and stoney and unpleasant for everyone to be around. Sometimes I DO want to get caught up in the drama and to just go off and emotionally vomit all over everyone.

However, I can't.

I am surrounded by drama queens and I really cannot afford to sit back and let all of my life get sucked into the vortex of UGH!. Someone has to be stronger than that, better than that, and I'm the only one I see standing.

So maybe I am martyring myself by shouldering this 'burden', this maturity, but I really don't think so. It doesn't fee that way, forced and tiring.

I know that life isn't always shiny. Sometimes, like now, I'm tired and slowing into something less than pink and sparkly and cherry blossomed. That's okay. It doesn't mean that I have to slip into Oscar the grouch, jump ship and join the asshole brigade that's swarming outside my heart.

I am a perfect little pippin. I am everything I need to be and I shant be bullied or coerced into being a monster. There is a wall at my place that needs to be baby pink, wrought iron furniture that needs to be assembled and apple-vanilla pies that need to be baked.

Life is good.
Sometimes I want to throttle it.
But I shant.

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, families, friends and everybody else! Halloween is almost upon us, which means Christmas is almost upon us!

If you are like me and my family, the holiday season gets real busy real fast, what with the shopping and the dinner parties and the shopping and the decorating, and the shopping and the TV specials and the shopping... you get my drift. :) Unfortunately, all the hustle and bustle leaves little time to spend with  my loved ones, the whole reason for those two weeks of vacation time, am I right?

Well, if you, or someone you know, has my holiday scheduling problem, I have the perfect solution, the perfect way to celebrate Christmas and to spend time with those people we hold near and dear...

BE IN A PLAY!

That's right! Come and audition for the Osceola Center for the Arts' production of "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever!" and bring your family along! All ages are welcomed and encouraged. That means Moms and Dads, brothers and sisters, Grandparents, cousins... everyone!

Auditions are November 2nd and 3rd at the Osceola Center for the Arts.

But what if you can't be there? No worries... come and see the show! Production dates are December 12th-21st. Call the box office for ticket reservations. Get on it quick, 'cause this show is just like St. Nick... it only comes once a year, and you sure don't want to miss it!

Here: http://meaghanfenner.livejournal.com/

come see me.

Today felt like Tallahassee.

I stepped out of Borders and the air felt like college, and the sky looked like North Florida, and I was quiet.

I've been quiet a lot, lately. I'm quiet, hoping someone will hear this poetic silence of mine and ask me to dance, ask me to talk, that someone will hear me when I whisper oh-so-perfectly, "I'm unhappy..."

This evening, outside of Borders, I was quiet because I stopped.

I'm not gonna go through this, 'what's the point?' nonsense, even though those are the first words that come up. What it boils down to is that I'm tired, I'm spent. I have given, not all, for sure, probably not even a lot, but enough for me to feel momentarily tapped.

I've been watching 'Heroes' and pinning after Issac's power. Oh, to close my eyes and create the future, to black out and create something like art, something like a voice, something like a light in my darkness. I wish my 'art' could do that. I wish I could lead myself out of my own personal labyrinth, toss my ball of twine and see where it goes, follow the path through this five and a half minute hallway and into something comfortable and well lit and something like home.

I am feeling abandoned by just about everything. I feel particularly vulnerable and anxious to alleviate all of this nonsense and in this rush to 'fix' myself I have hurt myself even more. I have trusted myself with too many people.

I was thinking about that on the way home, how so many people own pieces of me- the bits they've seen and remembered, the images and sounds and sensical graffiti they have pasted away inside themselves, pieces of me I can't have back. Words I can't un-say, notes I can't un-sing.

Who do I give these pieces to? Better still, why do I keep tossing myself, like breadcrumbs I hope to follow to some new home, some new reality, some new hope (yea, I said it) at the wrong people? The few, the proud, the ones who eat my crumbs and then casually toss out that they've had better and then go looking for a steak or a hot fudge sundae... something a little more substantial, a little sweeter than me, you see.

But somewhere outside Borders- my own personal wardrobe, it appears- it all stopped and for the first time in days I was able to enjoy the smell of the evening and put it all away, stash it back into it shoe box and stack it neatly in my ribcage, shelving it for later.

I want to say this is numbness, that it's all finally gotten to me and what I needed was an afternoon away to realize it. I needed one short day in the emerald city to see that the sin and evil that's swirling around me is inevitable, that nothing will change, that's I've given not wisely and not too well, either, that there really is no point.

What's the use of getting sober, when you're gonna get drunk again? as the poet said.

I'm trying not to be angry. I'm trying to figure out what to do next. Trying seems to be all I'm capable of these days. I can't seem to be optimistic. This probably wont end well. This probably wont end. This will probably stretch on until I'm dead and even then there will be some fresh hell to alternately slash at me and numb me to the core.

Please, don't understand this.
Please, be deaf to this too.

The karmic gods are laughing at me as only they can, so at least someone is enjoying my current state of things. Who knows, maybe you will laugh, too, and then this all really will be worth something.

I am in limbo. I can't go back and I'm not capable of moving forward, as of yet, so I am stuck. I say 'can't' because I quite simply wont and as far as I'm concerned it's the same thing. I say 'not capable' because I'm working on someone else's timeframe, which I'm finding more and more that I hate, and there doesn't seem to be a way to speed things up or change who's in charge, so here I am.

I am, at the moment, living in my room. I am, until further notice, calling myself homeless. This place isn't my home anymore. I'm tired of making my mother cry and being the greatest fuck-up for a daughter she's ever had. I'm dreading being in this space with her any longer and would love, love, LOVE, to pick up and ship out immediately if not sooner.

I will probably be, apologies all around, calling some of you soon in the hopes that I can crash on a couch or in a spare bedroom until my future living situation gets figured out. I'm not expecting anyone to return my calls. I figured I'd warn you, give you a sporting chance, you see, an opportunity to make up a story of why I can't be there or simply just to ignore the call.

Please, forgive my melodrama, but it's late, you see, I've had a long day and I'm feeling solidly empty, something like alone. I's feeling this great impermanence to my life, nothing stays forever or for any great period of time. I myself am moving, am transitioning and it's a lonely thing.

Curtness has replaced politeness and silence, witty banter.

I am alone.
And I am scared.

Beware.

my arm feels as though I've been stuck. my joint is sore and my skin feels clammy and sallow- yes, I know sallow isn't a feeling. It's bizarre. I wonder if someone drew blood while I was sleeping, if the devil walked in and stabbed at my veins and drew out or put in a world...

So, I think I'm fed up enough to finally, positively, launch myself into adulthood... whatever the hell that means.

Item one:
My room is a disaster. Yesterday, I was fine with this. Yesterday, I was proud of this. I was, honestly, close to taking pictures and posting them. There are clothes EVERYWHERE, but they're so colorful I thought it looked pretty. I have sneakers in my socks drawers and hats all over the floor. It's like a bloody mine field to get to my bed. Yesterday, I thought this was charming.

Today, however, today I feel a little differently. Today I had to fill out paper work and go through the motions of an orientation and I needed to look semi-professional. I had planned on my new turquoise dress, you know the one, but the thing was buried under layers of 'entertainingly colorful' laundry and books and packs of gum and the damned thing is wrinkled beyond belief... not wearable. I ended up wearing one of my cleavage dresses and, according to my mother, looking like one of the less desirable students on campus.

Yea.

Item two:
I needed my social security card for the filling out of paperwork this morning. I do not have my card because my dearly departed father insisted on keeping the damned thing in his safe, wanting to protect us from identity theft. In the 80's. Le grr.

So, I have to tell the Provost's secretary, this thankfully nice little old woman, that I don't have the thing, she tells me I need to reapply for one. Nifty. I'm thinking perhaps I can run home and rummage through the safe box and find my card, no problem.

Problem: Dad's method of cataloging is pretty much non-existent. Never mind that he can't explain what his system is or, better yet, just tell me where my card is in the first place- annoying on so many levels- but I found myself sorting through his life with my mom, my birth certificate, all the deeds to any cars we've ever owned... NO social security card. I'm so pissed at him for this.

So. Here's what I've come up with:

I'm ready to grow up. I'm ready to make him my official hero and model my life after him. I want to see my floor. I want clothes in the drawers, shoes in order on the floor, bed made. I want my social security card in my wallet, car clean, bank account semi-full and quiet.

I have a job now, a proper one. One that legally can't bend me over at the end of the day. I have things in my grasp, something like adulthood is so frickin' near I can smell it. I want it. I'm making this happen. I'm tired of not knowing where things are, of forgetting to bring scripts and then finding said script was actually buried under the rice picker hat and old McDonald's bags that I hadn't cleaned out because I was too lazy. That's my problem. Laziness. I don't sleep well sure, but that's no excuse to leave the clothes in the wash, to let my life get mired under all this mess that I'm calling eccentricity.

My life isn't 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' it isn't some film noir, or 70's French melodrama. I'm not sepia-ed or grainy or brightly colored. I'm not something else and I need to stop itching out to turn myself into this dream, into this thing. I'm fine as I am, well, I will be once I get there... life is a journey, not a destination *VOMIT*... but what I mean is I'm cool. I don't need to try to be something else, someone else.

I do, however, need to clean my room and organize my life. May I suggest that you all do the same.

So.

I'm keeping a copy of my future home's layout on my night stand, so I can go to sleep with visions of beige carpet dancing in my head.

I've been pouring over ikea's website to browse headboards and bookshelves, mentally rearranging furniture in my 700-something sq.ft. of living space.

I bought a new purse today (it's cheap, don't worry). Partly because I needed a new one and partly because it's a messenger bag and it'll be easier for me to carry all my books and what not from the apartment to the theatre... the complex is, I kid you not, directly behind the Center. Perfection, or what?

I've never felt this way about a man, a woman, a child or a piece of film before. This apartment and everything it's symbolizing- my new life (or at least a new chapter), my freedom, my official start as an adult- is doing it for me. I am thinking right now about my two favorite pair of shoes, my bestest girlfriend and grilled chicken caesar salad from Zaxby's and none of it's as shiney as the promise of a new tomorrow and my own walk in closet.

YES! I said walk in closet. I could house a Serbian family in the thing. Melooshe and his clan should be overjoyed. ;)

As soon as the money starts rolling in, and it will, that place'll be mine. OOOooooo! I can't wait!

I love hurricanes. I love the way the world feels right now, this cool and wet and wonderful- it's in the air and all over.

-there are things to scream to the heavens and I can feel more of it melting off of me. I woke up, small-eyed and headachey and somethings didn't matter. I realized it last night. there pieces I wont give up for whatever reason, and there are pieces that will always hurt. I'll aways hate, I'll always want, I'll always be disinclined. This is something I don't understand so I'm forcing it into a box I can-

I want to brush my teeth. I want to wash my face and go out into the wet world. I need a job. I'm in real estate love. I've found my apartment but don't have the monies to make it mine. So I'm supplementing. I'm growing up, spreading myself thinner than I already do. This is do-able. It's all do-able. I'm excited to have a goal, to have some possibilities opening up. so, yea for that. yea for that indeed.

Okay. Let me say something. I understand that I am, well have been, a relatively irresponsible person. I'm not a big math person and I'm mortally afraid of bills and this looming darkness called 'adulthood'. I don't watch my fundage and spend like a drunken sailor. I'm not too big on taking care of domestic things unless conditions are prefect- namely I'm alone and/or it's midnight and/or I have company coming soon. I've been a selfish, self-centered, spoiled person all of my life and am just now having to rewire myself.

However, I'm scouting for apartments and saving my pennies relatively well. I'm keeping my messes to my room where my door stays closed. I have figured out a budget and a way to keep in the relative black for the next year if I move into the dream space I've narrowed it down to.

I feel like the the other brother from 'Sabrina'- you know, the one that Greg Kinnear played in the remake? The social playboy who shirks working in the family office to play hooky with connecticut hookers, then steps up to the plate when he's needed and runs the damned business more efficiently than Harrison Ford or Humphrey Bogart or anyone.

Well, folks, I am Greg Kinnear! I am the other brother! I had my summer to make my hay or play the cricket or whatever. I am fully capable of taking care of myself- you all just assumed I couldn't do math. Don't worry, I assumed too. ;) But everything's going to go according to plan. I'll have enough money to take care of myself and my new life will be starting sooner than not. But please, believe me when I say this. Please believe that when I say I'v thought this through that I honestly have thought this through, and thoroughly too. :) I am, after all, and adult now and, being such an adept actress, I am perfectly ready to play the part.

So.

I'm sitting here, watching the previously mentioned "Sex in the City"... and my phone rings.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but the batteries .. phones last so much longer when said phone isn't being used. This particular charge has lasted me four- straight days. Four- straight-nearly-communication-less days.

So, the phone rings and I'm a little surprised. I'm even more surprised when it's an unfamiliar number.

Well, not completely.

The number is actually very familiar. It was a number I could've sworn I'd seen before, the area code so foreign, such an old addition to my book that it made my heart stop.

I thought he had called. It seemed that, for some reason, the stalemate had been called off and this area code had decided to call me.

So I pick up.

A woman laughs.

Okay, so it's not him.

The woman then proceeds to talk like she knows me, using my name, asking me how I was, then telling me about her family problems and all I can do is suppress laughter and utter shock and tell her I'm sorry to hear that.

Then she asks if I felt the earthquake they'd had not two minutes ago.

So, she's in California, where the earthquakes are, and doesn't realize that I'm not.

Rude as it was, I then hung up the phone and hid from her for the next five minutes when she kept calling back, trying to re-establish a connection.

So, there it was. My number had been given to her by our mutual friend as an 'in case of emergency' type person. That was before the mutual moved away, but only after he was driven out of me by me. Seeing his area code, for the first time in months, made me quake. I picked up the phone, my mind suddenly awash with what to say, how to sound, how I even felt about the call, when the third party emergency girl relieved me from having to know.

Or was is really a relief? I still don't know.

I want to reach inside my neck and finger out my spine. There's a section at the top of the column that's hinged where it shouldn't be and I want so badly to just unzip my skin and snap it all back into place with my sweet little fingertips. I'm sure I could do it if I could just get inside...

Isn't that the theme for my life these days? If only I could get inside, then all my problems would be solved. If only I could get inside the relationship, get inside the office, get inside a size 2. Why am I so ready to change the world? What is so bloody wrong with this one? But that's me, isn't it, always wanting what I can't have, the greener grass and whatnot.

Maybe that's what makes us humans better ourselves, that drive to have what we don't. But when does it stop? When is it some tiny, voiceless push to keep us evolving and when is it just plain dangerous and deluded? And what stage am I in? I'm gonna go with deluded and not just because I'm a natural born pessimist, no no, but because this particular brand of vodka is hurting my systems. I'm at home, eating cold-ish rice and beef stew, watching 'Sex and the City' and writing about how I saw the black painted hallway wall, the way it glistened like slick sickness under the lights and immediately thought, "That's my life, that wall. Black and running like ebony-ill blood or ultra muddy waters or the plague."

Um...what?

So, I'm switching to milanos, maybe to a hot fudge sundae, and I'm putting the wall away. I'm boxing up some stuff inside of me and hoping I can get my internal closet back in order. Things used to be so well done in there, I never felt anything I didn't want to. Now it's like one open wound after another. No more. I will take care of myself and, thereby, take care of those around me.

Bring on the fudge :)

...in small doses, of course. I am still hoping for a size 2.

My head is numb. A few minutes ago it was so full, thoughts speeding through like bullets and all of them causing as much damage. I was at home and it was suddenly December in that room. My ears were on fire, red and burning and causing my hair to singe. I was twirling and pulling my hair with amazing speed, little pieces of myself littered about the floor and in the floods of the chair in the wake of my thoughts.

They wouldn't stop, and I was in that December room, shivering under my skin and drowning in my thoughts, while the world passed by me as per usual. Maybe it's a good thing that no one sees. No, it IS a good thing. I don't want the world in on these thoughts when they attack. I don't trust myself when I get hit, that I can keep the pain of it all inside and not make a fool of myself or worse, drag someone into my own private civil war. This is not a wound to share as it's being created. When I cut myself, mentally or otherwise, I like to make sure I'm alone.

It's a terrible thing to look at someone else and see them as perfect. Not only that but it's dangerous. Perfection is this strange, seductive angel that flits in and out of reality and teases, oh how it teases. It hovers around ankles and toes, that I would normally never look twice at, and suddenly I'm memorizing freckles and birthmarks and the way the skin stretches across the bones... and it doesn't stop there. It never stops there. I'm lost in a room, watching, and some small voice in the back of my mind is screaming to stop, that I'll get caught, but the rest of me is willing time to slow, to stop to that I can savor every bit of visual, the fabric across the chest, the forearms and the fingers, fingernails, the ears, the chin, all the pieces that make me stop, that make the bullets start.

The danger, the pain, comes in looking at all the things that are there and knowing all the things that aren't here. I can look, I can watch and risk creepiness but I know, even as I indulge in this sin, that the act isn't being reciprocated. I've heard it said that you can't be in love alone. It is a horrible thing that you can be in lust alone.

I'm wondering why I'm doing this to myself, why I keep looking. Maybe I'm enjoying the aesthetic, and I am. I wish I could turn the chesty bits off- the flutterings and the pullings that start in my lungs and then quickly start to roller coaster downwards. I might never get over this and sometimes I look into the dark road of the future and see the thunder and cold skies of me wanting, fruitlessly.

I know I'm not the first girl in the world that hasn't been wanted, but it doesn't make it any easier. It's embarrassing to admit. There's something about me physically that is unappealing and I can girl power myself all I want, say I'm witty therefore I must be attractive in some light, but the truth is whenever I'm alone in bed and thinking and feeling those darker desires that I save for my sheets, it's his face I picture, I picture it above me, his hair, his nose, his eyes, but mine isn't the body he's making love to. Mine isn't the body he wants and I've seen what he wants and what he's wanted in the past and I'm not that. I'll never be. Even if I stopped eating now I'd never become what he wants. Never. He'll never want me.

No, this is good. I need to say it, to type it and then look back over it, remind myself. I need for people to know so that when I talk about him, I can see the pity of knowledge in folks' eyes. I need to shamed into safety. I need to know that this isn't an acceptable thing to talk about and then eventually I'll know it's unacceptable to feel and then I'll be ready.

For what, though?

What exactly am I waiting for? Or better yet looking for?

Sometimes I'll see myself with someone else, I'll imagine us eating at Crispers, holding hands, me making them soup while I slip across their kitchen floor in my socked feet. I can imagine all these things but wont take the steps to achieve them. I keep myself carefully locked away to that I can construct these perfect little fantasies that can't get spoiled by dragging them into the harsh light of day. My mind is safer, except for the thought bullets, which were endangering my fragile little daydreams tonight in the December of that room.

I swear, it was snowing. The walls were white and sleeted and closing in, the avalanche caused by the noise in my brain, the buzzing of want and cerebralizing every little inch of my body, his body, all the ways they interact and all the ways they never will, the sound of it mounting and closing in on me until I felt cold and frozen and now, finally, numb.

I'm feeling alone. I'm realizing how alone I am. I cleared my life of a best friend and have no one I can trust every inch of myself with. Even now, I'm censoring some small part, choosing the prettier words. I need to trust someone. I need to look at someone and know that they're looking back. I need to be reciprocated. I need to be touched.