The 30th Episode!

MY IRRATIONAL FEER OF STINK BUGS! A WHOLE LOT OF RECAP! That same Spanish/English love poem again. SRIRACHA!!!! A whole metric fuckton of Reggaeton! A SMALL FRACTION OF THE LESSONS WE HAVE LEARNED. MAHI-MAHI! I will make you t-shirts. I CANNOT TALK TO WOMEN! Figure drawing of me by Johnathan Nix.

EXERPT:

Hello, and welcome, you are listening to Sunday Nights Are For Hopeless Romantics… and this is your host, Olivia Wade, and I’m here to make you slightly uncomfortable! And by you, I mean my exes... just kidding, I love you all, I mean I still love you, I mean you guys are alright….

And that’s how I opened the first show. Still true, just you know, now I just love them and let them do their thing in a very different space as me and leave them alone. It’s called love folks, look it up. 

Alright, well folks, this is it! 

No no you aren’t getting rid of me that easily.

But this is it, the 30th episode of Sunday nights are for hopeless romantics. We did it! Finally, my show is older than I am. And I think it’s about time, that we did a little review… of what we have learned here. I think the most important thing is that I’m deathly afraid of stink bugs, of course, I mean they are just tiny slowly moving dinosaurs. And have you ever been swarmed by them? No?!?! Well, then, you probably don’t have an irrational fear of them. But I have. Imagine, a swarm of slow clumsy dinosaurs aimed at your head. I mean really picture it. It’s a horrible experience. Anyways!!!! Now that we have gotten the most important thing out of the way. Really I’m just going to recap things and then play a bunch of Reggaeton and Spanish pop music. I mean basically I’m doing whatever the heck I want. So is it really any different than any other show? No, not at all. So, let’s take it back, to the very beginning.  Where I use, this quote… “you can think, ‘this will be disappointing,’ and go for it anyways” to describe my love life. You know, a lot can change in 30 episodes. So glad that I managed to turn that one around. Phewww, she was so so jaded. Thank goodness I screamed into the void enough to learn that our lives are self fulfilling prophecies. That would have been rough. And you know what, I think I can honestly say that the reason I started this show, the incredible unrequited love that drove me to yell about my feelings on public radio. Well it’s gone, so like… WHY AM I STILL HERE?!?? Ahhh, the existential question. Because, I think, I have found, that there’s something cathartic about speaking your truth - something beautiful about being a work in progress for the world to see week after week. It keeps me learning, keeps me growing, holds me accountable to myself. And it worked! I accomplished what I set out to do when I started this show, which was to finally get over that one person I could never let go of. But, because it’s still sometimes true… Ohhh god, NO really?!? Yes. Sometimes that grief just changes. It’s still there, just in a different form - in quiet little moments. Until I remember, that I have created a beautiful life for myself in the absence of them. But I’m still, yes, going to read you The Loving (And Loosing) Room, because, well, let’s just hear absolutely how MOOODY I was when I started this show. I mean she was ANGSTY! 

Anyways here’s the poem. And then I’m just going to quickly segue into some Reggaeton and we can have a mother f’n party up in this b. Because, well, there’s a lot more love now, and a lot less sorrow.

But first, here’s The Loving (And Loosing) Room, by me. Because well, like I always say, it’s ohh so human. 

“Where have the last 3 years gone 

I wonder sometimes,

If it will ever feel that way with anyone else,

it drove me to the darkest parts of myself, grasping at that feeling in other places, other people, other lives. 

Like we were a mounting electrical storm, the moment of drowning and living all at once. Your bedroom lit on fire, every vein in my body running with white hot light, the surrealists couldn’t even paint us loving each other. Burned retinas. It would be too much to contain on a canvas, flashed out back to white. Everything and nothing in one singular point. Waves of you crashing over the canvas of me. I’m still just coming up for air, purging my lungs of you not wanting me.

Your ghost still walks around my kitchen, laughing and teasing me, some inside joke we had. 

Everything,

I tried everything....

To banish you, let your eyes holding on to mine, go.  

And every time I get close, there we are again.

Swaying in my memory, trapped in that moment cooking dinner in a fancy house for fancy people as Sam Cooke plays.

And the guests disappear,

and the stove disappears.

And all I can see is you, twirling me into your arms. 

And for a moment. 

You love me again. 

And in the harsh reality of the moment, I have already left you. We are already over. 

And you don’t understand why. 

And we look up, all eyes on us, suddenly the room is full of people again, staring at us from the dinner table across the room. We are not alone in this moment.

They fawn, “you are the most beautiful couple.”

And we look at each other, smiling, breaking open inside, playing the charade, we laugh and lie, brush it under the rug in the dining room like it’s just another pile of dirt to be hidden away. 

They believe us, because it’s not a lie, really. 

My mirror, my lover, my best friend. 

My mind creates you in your absence and I used to drink myself to sleep just to fall into another dream where I talked to you like you were still there. 

One sweet fictitious moment, to reason out my life with you. 

Every day now is just a sweet loneliness, a gentile waiting, for a love that hasn’t come. 

A face mask.

The kettle boiling.

Knitting a pair of socks.

Learning another story. 

One where I wrap my arms around myself holding together the perpetual loosing of you.

It’s almost lovely now. 

Now I just think of how you would like the dinner I cooked tonight, or the way those flowers smell, or the strange piece of esoteric knowledge I am studying. 

You sit down at the table next to me, in the living (and losing) room where I sit with my dog at my feet. And drink my 1000th cup of tea alone. And then I get up, and wash the dishes in silence. Trying to convince my mind that you won’t be knocking on the door. Because that’s not what’s real, and brutally, it never was, it’s not who you are.

You are your own complicated a person. 

I wonder if I will ever feel like I know the whole story. I feel like there are gaps, things missing that I don’t understand. Like an old wooden gig saw puzzle missing just enough pieces that I can’t make out the whole picture. Always wondering, what did I miss. Tell me you hate the sound of my voice and to leave you alone. At least the puzzle pieces will float down and fill in the edges. How they got there no one knows, but at least there’s the whole story. 

I have built a beautiful life in the container of your absence. A quiet and peaceful one, full of daily meetings, heart and wit. And I remember, I try to remember that you are always more tender in my mind. 

That the stories we tell ourselves become us, and become us. 

And that if I write the story where I never let you go, and walked alone through the silence holding myself that wouldn’t really be a happy ending. Not that I think I above all others deserve a happy ending, but maybe just one where someone gets to appreciate the way I combine bone broth with tarragon and white miso, the way I lie draped in silk in the touch of early morning. Or the way I over talk when I’m nervous. 

But I don’t think I could make enough art to unfeel your lips pressed up against mine, or your hands lifting my waist onto red sheets. 

“Maybe you just aren’t fucked up enough for him anymore,”

well, then, what’s the point of healing anyways? Two shots of tequila and my demons back please. Let’s get that old insecurity to scream inside my head again that I’m not worthy. 

No. 

I would rather be alone in silence than together in insanity. 

What part of our story do I own. Only what is mine. 

And this time I’m going to write a better one. Even if it means that I never get to hold your hand again, or lay my head on your chest, or drink coffee with you in the mornings. 

For now, I’ll just sit with your ghost, as the light comes in sideways through the kitchen window. And maybe brew a second cup of coffee in my mind. And lean down to pet my dog amid the sounds of nothing.

And hold the memory of the last note you hid behind the painting of us in my apartment in Florence “I can’t wait to see you, you’re coming home. I love you so much.” 

Where does all that loving go now?”

Olivia Wade: Feb. 16th 3:15am 2021

I have unwittingly answered that question. That I asked at the end of that poem in my first show. 

The loving is turned into art, that lands you in wild shibari threesomes, that ends up with healing, that brings joy and pleasure into your life, it transforms under the hands of new lovers, in the eyes of people that really see you. It evolves into a beautiful community, and ride or die friends, it transforms into you transforming yourself out of suffering. But only, only if you learn from it. 

So let’s crank it up, and listen to my absolute favorite genera of music. My go to kitchen jams when I was working as a chef. The music I bump at top volume out of the speakers in my truck. The music I dance to alone in the kitchen. Here’s “Mi Gente” by J Balvin & Willie William. Followed by “Mayores” by Becky G and Bad Bunny. Woooooo!!! As we would always say when sending out slightly different food than someone ordered off the menu… “It’s great, there gonna love it!!!”