The Squirrels Keep Taking Down My Prayer Flags

It takes me an hour and 20 minutes to drive to the clinic in Saratoga Springs. Today I woke up and couldn’t get out of bed for an hour. Day 2 of a cleanse, I woke up, ate some sort of sweet potato chia detox breakfast (it actually didn’t suck completely). I took a shower, a pack of vitamins 5 to be exact. And crawled back in bed. Until I had to get dressed to leave. I pulled on a white cashmere sweater, a white pair of dickies slacks, Blundstone boots, a tasteful pair of earrings, wrapped my Apple Watch on my right wrist, grabbed my Mala, and looped it around the other along with a chain and a real gold-coated 4 leaf clover. I stood in the mirror putting on my makeup, the same exact way I have for 15 years. Thinking to myself, what does it matter, the only people who are going to see you today are the nurses, maybe another patient getting an IV in a different room. I checked my sleep tracking, I managed to get a full 8 and a half hours last night and I still feel like this. Ok, well hormones make it worse and I always forget that the week before my period is #hellweek. Hazing like you wouldn’t believe. I let my dog out because I won’t be home for a couple of hours. Cover my neck and back in Biofreeze and get in my car. I’m late. I drive weaving in and out of cars in my Land-Rover-green 2015 Tacoma which honestly takes a lot more pressure on the gas pedal than you’d expect to get a small truck up to 75 miles an hour. I remember, god damn it, my check engine is on, and my truck is due for its service, which reminds me I have to pay my registration fee. Of course, I forgot that. Again. But if that’s the worst thing I forget today I’m doing alright. I think about how clean the house is. Meals for my cleanse in containers in the fridge, everything is under control I think to myself while simultaneously remembering that I kind of constantly feel like I am hovering between absolute clarity and a complete mental breakdown. I turn on the heat, and yes it’s August and yes it’s 75 degrees outside but my veins are so scarred by now that the nurses need all the help I can give them in that respect. I don’t have the greatest veins, I used to go in years ago, and someone would try to get a line in me 5 maybe 6 times before we called it quits and I went home. It was rare, but it did happen. Kind of a blur to be honest. The heat in my car rises above 80 and I still have 40 minutes of drive left. I gulp down some more sparking water. Put on my radio show, it’s an hour long, so should distract me till I’m there. I like to listen through it to hear how cringe I am, see if I said anything horrible, and mostly to listen to myself give me advice. Nothing like having to take your own advice. And I think that more often than not we actually already know what to do, or how to respond, or how to move through the world, but we just don’t listen to ourselves. So, here I am, actually listening to myself. And sometimes it’s mortifying, I hear something and I’m like “damn I really said that on live public radio ok, ok.” And sometimes I am in love with a sentence, and I remember that I am useful. My mind wanders, sometimes I think about that reading I got from the psychic in Woodstock 5 years ago. How she told me that I would dedicate my life to helping people, I was like yeah right that’s ridiculous, I was working as a line cook, running a kitchen, drinking all night and sleeping all day, chain-smoking cigarettes, and generally couldn’t even imagine helping myself. She said I would change things. I didn’t believe her, sometimes I still don’t. She told me that there was another love, waiting for me, somewhere down the line. That it would be beautiful, a companion, and that we would be happy for many years late into life, where something would happen, and I would spend the last part of my life alone. That they were already present in my life then, I just didn’t know it. Maybe they had always been there, she said. And we would be partners and maybe have 2 children (that’s a fucking exact number lady, why?). Something I absolutely didn’t think was possible, lady I’m gonna die before I’m 30. Kids?! You have to be loco for coco puffs. And then she said something strange. She told me that she could see I was worried about the guardian of our family, the one who held everything together, and that they would be healthy again soon and live a long life. I wasn’t going to lose anyone for a long time. My grandfather had cancer. She couldn’t have known. He’s better than fine now. And she told me that there would be struggles but that ultimately my life would be beautiful, long, and full of love. But maybe that’s just what people like to hear I think. And then I wonder, a lot, if the time in the hospital when I was stripped of everything and sat in the emergency room at Baystate as carts with ultrasounds raced in and out of the room, checking my heart, strapped to monitors, my body was going to give out, my heart really, of course, for 48 hours holding on to the edge of life, not by my own volition but just because I couldn’t get all the way up out of my body. Believe me, I tried. My body was a war zone, I didn’t want to be there. Who would? But I could only get halfway out. Something tied me here. It frustrated me. Anyways. Sometimes I wonder if when I almost died that it somehow changed my future. Maybe I skipped tracks somewhere or accidentally derailed the train entirely. Or maybe, that was the moment it even became possible. The day I got sober. And I realize I’ve stopped listening to my show now and gotten sidetracked. Did I miss my fucking soulmate, who knows, does it matter if I don’t know what I’m missing? Do I even believe in any of that anyways? It’s now 85 degrees in my car and I’m sweating, just another 20 minutes, I roll down the window, I can’t do it. 10 minutes I roll it back up. Ok. I can do this now.

I pull into the parking lot, and walk up to the little medical complex that looks more like a big house than a doctor’s office. They don’t have me on the schedule. Mentally I was preparing myself for a whole day-long ordeal. I had something crazy scheduled today, or so I thought, I was supposed to have a treatment where they take roughly a liter of blood out of me through one Iv in my left arm, and then it gets run through this insane German machine called and Eboo, and oxygenated, and filtered almost like dialysis, and then it gets sent back into you through the other Iv in your right arm. It always makes me a little lightheaded and nauseous. But if you think about it every human has roughly 4 liters of blood in their body, so taking 1/4 of that blood out and cleaning it isn’t such a bad idea. We are full of a lot of junk that doesn’t do us any good. Especially me. But, they don’t have me on the schedule. The clinic is quiet and there’s only one other person sitting in one of the rooms. They offer to give me a different treatment. So at least I didn’t drive here for nothing. I am grateful. They offer me my choice of rooms. I like the one in the back, with the long windows. Clouds come in and it threatens to rain. I sit down next to the large machine that reads, hemolumen photochromatic device. Across me is a picture of a sunflower on the wall. There are a few live plants in the room, that’s nice I never noticed the maybe 50 other times I’ve been here, to the new office. The nurse slides a large needle into one of the veins on the back of my left arm, it takes a second, but she’s good, she finds it, and I hear the click of the retractor, the needle withdrawing and leaving a catheter, a piece of hollow plastic giving her access to my vein. She flushes it with saline, making sure there is good blood return (which just means, when you pull the syringe back to make sure you can get good blood flow) She attaches the Iv, but it slips, blood flows a little out onto the pad underneath my arm, not too much, I’ve seen a lot worse. She catches it and repositions the Iv. My blood runs into a specialized bag, through glass tubing. They take out a couple hundred milliliters from me. I’m not quite sure how much. It’s run through ultraviolet lights, and I’m strapped into ultraviolet wristbands, and two large light pads, one on my neck and the other on my lower back. Now I look more like I feel, an anomaly. They attach the bag to a tank of o3 which gets forced through the blood converting to o2 oxygen. It’s a treatment much more common in Germany than in the US. It falls under holistic medicine. You are creating an environment in the body for less oxidation of the cells, faster healing, increased immune system response. The nurse comes back to check how much blood has drained out of me. “Just making sure we’ve got enough juice in the tank.” She jokes endearingly. Finally, the whole process is done and my blood mixed with oxygen and a little heparin, which keeps the blood from clotting, comes back through the Iv. You would think it would make you lightheaded like giving blood. But it’s like somehow your body knows it’s going to get it back. I’ve always thought that’s kind of funny. The Iv runs for about half an hour, and then the other nurse comes in and says “You donezo?” she’s known me for at least 3 years now. I don’t remember, maybe it’s longer. We laugh, I’m a little covered in blood today, not a great day to wear white but I’d rather have blood on me than have not gotten an Iv in, ohh boy we’ve seen it all. We’ve seen the trenches, comradery that only exists in those places. She doesn’t have to treat me like every other patient. I’ve done it all, seen it all. A veteran of the process. I don’t tell her she’s one of 3 people I’ll speak to today. That I’ll go home, and maybe cry for a while, look at my alive sunflowers, talk to my dog, and watch tv. Eat my detox lunch.

And I think about how actually unconventional this is. It’s the outskirts of modern medicine, but I’ve done almost everything conventional, and this is the one thing that seems to make me feel actually better. The bar is pretty low though. It clears my head, which makes about 70% of the difference. She disconnects me from the IV, flushes saline, pulls the catheter out, wraps my arm in a piece of gauze and red sports wrap. I thank everyone, especially the nurse who brought me hot water for my detox tea, “high maintenance today” I joke like I haven’t heard insane people complain about every little thing in those clinic rooms over the last 6 years. I’m supposed to have 2 cups between now and lunch, between lunch and the broth I’ll eat for dinner. And I go to my car, adjust my rearview and I catch myself in the mirror. I look good today, my skin looks pretty ok, my makeup looks nice, my hair dried in such a lovely way, I mean I never let it air dry, I always blow it out otherwise it does strange things. Or mostly I just wear it up. But today I didn’t have the energy. But it looks perfect. And there’s this bittersweetness. Yeah, it’s great… but who is this for? I’m going home and I won’t see anyone else today. Why did I even change out of my sweatpants, just to feel like kind of a normal human? You know that’s seriously underrated, the shift you can make mentally when you’re like, just wearing pants. I cover my neck and lower back in Biofreeze again, and pull out of the parking lot. Maybe I’ll find some new music on the drive home. It’s a rap phase, it’s been a long time since I’ve had one, but you know, disrespectful shit I call your bitch the lumber zone. Anything that makes me laugh at this point. Also, it’s my roots, the original Olivia. Run it, I guess. It’s hard to be too depressed when someone is rapping at you with a South African accent and it just slaps. Anyways.

I think on my drive back… when did I go from seeing an American flag and feeling nothing to seeing one mounted on someone’s garden post, or by a house door, and feeling like actually a little afraid. I wouldn’t go there if my car broke down and I needed help. I saw a bumper sticker on the highway that just said coexist but it was made of different kinds of guns. And I have to admit I kind of laughed out of horror, like yep, let’s just give everyone a whole bunch of guns, that’ll help everyone coexist peacefully. Right. Ahhh the answer. I mean we’ve been fighting each other since the beginning of time just with like hand-carved arrows that took years of skillful training to master. I think that was a good prerequisite. Maybe in order to own a gun you should have to learn to forge metal, to make gunpowder, to assemble every part, how to perfectly hit a moving target, and have a necessity for survival. I must hunt my food or my family will perish. We’ve just taken it to a whole new level. 14 hundred nuclear bombs to level the playing field. And it could. Absolutely level every field and valley and hill in the world. Have you ever heard anything crazier than mutually assured destruction? If anyone has a temper tantrum we all die. The sunflowers on my windowsill are the brightest deepest yellow/orange color I have ever seen. Want to slow down time? Just do a cleanse, and watch every moment of the day. Remember to take your vitamins! Sit in silence. Something keeps taking down the prayer flags I put up on the porch, it’s either the birds or the squirrels or the chipmunks. A host of the usual suspects. The squires have pronounced violence against my particular flags. I wonder if they know that it means you are safe here. There are no guns in this house, you can always come to me scared and alone. I put up a hummingbird feeder, hesitantly, because you know for a long time the hummingbirds went away. While I was drowning. But they have only come back in moments since I decided to live above water. What does it say when I’m more worried about being rejected by the hummingbirds than a potential lover? In my house, we put our boots on the coffee table. “We” is just an “I” really. But in this house, we put our boots on the coffee table. And secure the prayer flags back to the railing with florists wire. Maybe this time they will hold.

Poems From Episode 36

See my deconstruction below.

“So for the purpose of clarification. I will answer these questions. 

What if that lover never wants you?

Well, I guess I’ll fall apart and then pick myself back up again, focus myself back on the work I have to do here in this world. And know that there will be more love someday. That somewhere there is a person, that wants to stand by my side through it all. And face this messy life with me. Providing I can make my way back to enough faith to know that. 

What if the fairy tale never comes? 

Well, it hasn’t, and fairytales are for children. This life is hard, but it’s also beautiful. And I’ll make if it what I can. I’ll work with what I have here. I’ll build it myself, brick by brick, until i walk through the gardens of my pleasure. 

What will you do when the day spreads herself before you and all you can think of is night? 

Be patient. 

And the night, what if she leaves you empty? 

Well folks it wouldn’t be the first time, and lord knows it won’t be the last. So I’ll knit, and stare at my dog, and eat leftovers, and shout into the void like I always do. And pray, that tomorrow’s lighter. 

Will you keep lying there begging to be filled? 

No, I will find grace enough in the lonely, grace enough in the silence, to let it be empty. 

Will you keep staring at the horizon and dreaming? 

Doubtless, but I’ll attempt to pull myself back into the present. To my feet on the earth. To what I can do with where I am. 

Will you close the book and head into the unknown, or will you keep reading? 

I have never been one to give up on learning the lessons, but the unknown holds great potential. I guess I am torn. Maybe that’s where all of my problems lie here. 

Will you keep hoping this life is what you want? Or will you make it your own? 

I guess if those are my choices the only right one is to make it my own. But I’m order to do that I must have faith, so there must be some hope left in me. I guess I’ll try to do both. Simultaneously. As it goes, it is my life, and I guess I will not choose. Can I have it all? 

Who knows. 

But I it’s with finding out. 

Or at least. I hope so. 

And remember, your life is exactly what you think it is. So it’s time to refocus. My life is also the work I have to do here in the world. And if I choose meaning, my life will have meaning. And I believe, that out there waiting for me, there is a key, that fits into a lock that no one else can open. A system of healing, a way of being, a discovery that only I can make. By combining all the versions of my lessons, into something useful. And I must keep learning. So that I can develop it. So that I can teach it to the world. And maybe ease some suffering, if only for a few people, if only a fraction. I will have accomplished what I set out here to do. So I choose everything, that keeps me in service of that. 

If I choose once again, to make peace with these four walls — they will hold me, instead of keeping me captive. All I am, in service of whatever the next chapter holds. 

But folks, my hands are tired. 

And I’m going to just drink a cbd ginger ale and go to bed. Because I’ve had just about enough universe for one day. 

And I’m sure, I am certain something will happen soon, to remind me to have faith, that everything happens for a reason on this wild rock hurtling through space. And I’ll look up at the stars to remind me that I am one little wildly significant and somehow completely insignificant part of this complicated world. Trying my best to be honest. One day at a time.”

-Olivia Wade

Poems From Episode 34

In search of something. I don’t quite know what.

Olivia Wade 10.25.21

If you want something done 

right do it yourself.

Better done by yourself, she thinks loudly. 

But your hands reaching for mine in the 

dark.

Foreign travelers. 

Speak of distant lands.

Crush of leaves,

Autumn in her splendor. Or maybe the 

ocean. I’m not quite sure yet. 

Basquiat, 14-horses-worth of heartbreak &

study of the male torso. 

Your roadmaps of lines. Palms up. Facing mine. 

Sigils, alters, and the chronology.

Fields

of 

thyme.

I wonder, will I make my way back to them? 

Ship with hull hewn. 

Cherrybright mapleready. 

Or will I grow old in the houses of my 

childhood. 

Alone, on a couch in a room, with eyes 

closed staring 

at the everynothing. 

Breathing one more drop of verdant peace. 

Variations on a pondside shore. Your skin 

pressed up against mine. 

Blades of grass bent, under the weight. 

The wind

Made love to us. I swear it. 

Olivia Wade 10.25.21

“Please confirm 

that you know where you are going.” 

Well you have me by the heartstrings. 

But say it in broken Spanish. 

It will be easier for me to understand. 

Although not my first language, or my last.

But a lady should never kiss and tell. 

I think I’ve forgotten. 

Does the journey inland have less waves? 

May I offer you a trolly car?

Or an uncomfortable silence? 

I am nothing, if not reverent, of confusing vignettes. 

A stranger offers me directions. 

A reconstructed cameo of my own name. 

All you must do is live.

If only fate weren’t such a touchy master.

It only works when you are paying attention. 

All of my invisible cities for every ounce of 

your understanding. 

But I’m still waiting. 

For some epic spark that hasn’t seemed to 

have found my lips yet. 

I think it’s lost. 

The stars think I need to make a choice. 

How can I choose if you can’t find me?

How do I make fate my bitch?

I’ll carve your imaginary name into stacks of notebooks. 

Impractical.

Over

And 

Over

And 

Over 

Again.

One step closer. 

Careful, drying leaves give your feet away in the forest. 

Maybe a crunch but  

I can’t hear 

You. 

Yet.

But I have never been called logical. 

Couldn’t find your boots, laced-up-drawstring ready,

ahh of course you never showed. 

I know. Somehow. Somewhere. 

You can sense me. 

The lines forming on my face.

My breasts never quite as hefty as I want them to be.

The water over my skin.

Your fingers run across my cheeks.

Ephemeral. With just a hint of morning. 

Mourning?

17 lovers, 3 scarves, 14 new pairs of shoes. 

Armies of methodical, meticulous, plates of food. 

Crushing pomegranate seeds 

in search of vast understanding. 

But darling, she says… “where have you been all my life?” 

I don’t know, 

please confirm that you know where you are going. 

I haven’t dreamt in 3 months. 

My psyche is tired, of trying to…

I’m missing a number 2, 

Out of the Fibonacci sequence 

of my impenetrable existence. 

Once I find it,

I can make use of the rest? 

Or these mixed metaphors,

For idealism. 

13,000 stories. 

And all of them I built for you.