Page 18 of All the Way to the River
O nce more, I must be careful here, in the telling of our story.
I do not wish to pathologize my relationship with Rayya any more than I wish to idealize it.
I am not merely a walking dysfunction; nobody is.
I am also a wonderful person—kind, generous, bighearted and enthusiastic, and quick to celebrate and uplift my friends. I love to share, I love to give, and I love to be of service to other people’s dreams and talents.
And Rayya was a wonderful person, too—vivid, courageous, loving, funny, and loyal.
Our love for each other was sincere, and it was marked by dysfunction and manipulation.
As in many relationships, our shining attributes and our character defects were on display at the same time.
Yes, I had initially been drawn to rescue Rayya when she became lost and in need of help, because I am deeply attracted to people who are lost and in need of help.
But then she’d turned around and offered me something that nobody else had ever been able to provide.
She gave me a profound sense of emotional security, while also modeling an admirable spirit of compassion and tolerance toward those who were suffering and struggling through life.
She fortified my spine while softening my heart.
I liked the person I became when I was around her; I was both more courageous and more kind when Rayya was in the room.
Maybe that’s what true love does for us: It betters us.
Moreover, she seemed to do all this effortlessly—even joyfully—while also being mindful not to take too much from me in return. (At least not in the beginning!)
So I submit that I loved Rayya Elias dearly—and that I had good reason to love her.
But I am also a love addict, which complicates matters somewhat.
Actually, it complicates matters considerably.
A friend of mine who is familiar with both my messy relationship history and my recent recovery journey asked me the other day, “So where is the line, exactly, between regular love and love addiction?”
To which I could only reply, “I’ve got bad news for you, buddy. Nobody really knows.”
It’s the same with all addictions. When does a regular drinker become a heavy drinker? And when does a heavy drinker become a problem drinker? And when does a problem drinker become an alcoholic? And when does an alcoholic become a danger to themself and others?
It’s often impossible to know exactly when, how, and why these escalations occur.
In the rooms of recovery, this is called “the invisible line”—that shady moment when complete dependency sets in, and the addict is no longer capable of living a manageable or dignified life.
The invisibility of that line is a large part of the reason that identifying and treating addiction is so difficult.
It’s also why addicts of all varieties are so masterful at denying that they have a problem in the first place, and why they are so good at gaslighting and deceiving their loved ones.
But if I had to define the difference between regular love and love addiction, I would say that it has to do with the level of intensity —with the sense of urgency, dependency, and desperation that grows by the day until it becomes an obsession, trailing behind it a wreckage of lies, destruction, and self-abandonment.
And once that hungry ghost is awakened, it can never really be sated.
The complicated truth, then, is that I fell in love with Rayya for a set of very understandable reasons—but over time I came to love her with the famished lunacy of a true addict.
But that only happened because I had a secret operating system based in fear and need that was running in the background of all our interactions, governing my decision-making from the most shadowy recesses of my mind and pushing me in directions that were unsafe, unethical, and dishonest.
And, as it turns out, so did she.
I will never know exactly when Rayya started drinking. I have no way of knowing. She never gave a straight answer about it to anybody. Her story about alcohol changed depending upon whom she was talking to. But I now understand that she was drinking in secret long, long before she did it in public.
But let me see if I can piece together some information here, based on what I do know.
Rayya moved into my church in 2008. After I invited her to stay for another nine months, she did indeed begin working on a memoir—which was all about her miraculous recovery from substance addiction.
She struggled with the focus required for writing, but she kept at it, and I poured encouragement and guidance into her wherever I could.
She was determined, she told me, to finish at least one creative project in her life that she could be proud of, no matter how difficult.
But by the end of that nine-month period, she was still not quite finished with the memoir, and I still couldn’t bear to let her go. We worked out an arrangement where she would pay me just enough each month to cover utilities, so she could officially move into the church and settle down.
My relief was immense: Rayya was staying; I would be safe forever.
We became closer by the day. She called me whenever she was in trouble, just as I called her when I was in trouble.
But it wasn’t only problem-solving that brought us together; it was also delight in each other’s company.
Very soon, Rayya became my plus-one for social events and professional engagements.
She flew to London to do my hair and makeup for the British premiere of the Eat Pray Love movie—and she also walked the red carpet with me.
(I will never forget Rayya making Julia Roberts laugh uproariously when she said to her, mid-hug, “Dude, you smell so fucking good right now!”) We went to Mexico together, to Detroit, to Los Angeles, to Austin, to Australia, to New Zealand, to Miami.
We went to the movies, to weddings, to Target, to McDonald’s, to Thanksgiving, to the DMV, to Beyoncé concerts, to karaoke, to the Jersey Shore.
We met Oprah together. We tried on bras together, shopped for shoes together, ate Korean barbecue together, made tacos together, watched football games together, got Botox together.
We were almost always out there in public now as “Rayya and Liz,” and people were growing accustomed to that pairing.
You might wonder how this impacted my marriage, but I—using my excellent compartmentalization skills—convinced myself that there was absolutely no problem here.
The way I saw it, I now had a platonic partner who enjoyed attending the sorts of social events with me that my husband disliked, and who also helped to stabilize my mental health.
If you looked at it through a certain lens—while peeking through the cracks between the fingers of the hands you were holding over your face—it could be seen as a win for everyone!
And although Rayya and I never crossed any obvious boundaries—never flirted with each other, never got physical with each other—I can see now that we were living in a state of shared denial about what was actually happening here.
And what was actually happening here was that I was steadily moving my love and loyalty away from one person and toward another—just as surely as if I were moving a valuable set of silverware from one home to another, one spoon at a time, while nobody was looking.
All the while pretending that I was not doing that.
Meanwhile, Rayya continued to date other women.
I tried to be supportive about her romantic endeavors, because of course she deserved to have someone in her life who loved her—someone who was available!
But if I am honest, I can see that these women never really had a chance with Rayya, no matter how great they were—and often they were great—because Rayya herself was not available.
She had already imprinted her heart upon me, just as I had imprinted my heart upon her.
And she would often come home from her dates and say to me and our friends, “She was nice enough, but she’s not Liz . ”
“But you can’t expect anybody to deliver that level of intimacy on a first date!” I would protest (while secretly, shamefully rejoicing). “You and I have been friends for a decade and a half, Rayya! Look how long it took us to reach this level of closeness! You need to give people a chance!”
“But can’t we just clone you instead, so I can have one of you ?” she would say. “Wouldn’t that be easier for everyone?”
And everyone would laugh and act like this was a completely normal thing to say.
Still, not everyone liked the Rayya and Liz Show.
An old friend of Rayya’s told me years later how sometimes she would be on the phone with Rayya, in the middle of an intimate conversation, and suddenly Rayya would say, “I gotta go—Liz is on the other line!” And she would hop right off and not call back for days.
Another old friend of Rayya’s said to her at the time, “It’s like you’ve divided your friends into two categories. You’ve got your A-list friends, which is only Liz. And then you’ve got your B-list friends, which is everyone else.”
“That’s right,” said Rayya, with her characteristic straightforwardness. “And don’t ever expect it to be any different.”
And one day an old friend of mine was talking to an acquaintance about some event that I attended with Rayya Elias, and the acquaintance asked, “Who’s Rayya Elias?”
Without thinking, my friend replied, “She’s the love of Liz’s life.”
So everyone knew . But nobody knew knew .
Because that’s what secret lives create: wild, hallucinogenic distortions of reality.
Speaking of distortions of reality, I would guess that it was probably sometime around 2011 that I started noticing that the love of my life always carried bottles of Angostura bitters around with her, hidden in her purse.
Maybe you are familiar with this concoction, maybe not.