Page 2 of All the Way to the River

But that won’t be for a long time, and don’t go busting your ass looking for me all over the universe before then!

Just go live your life and make it fully yours.

That’s one of the things, the main thing, you came here to do—to learn how to live your own life without obsessing about anyone else.

That’s your path and you’re on it—and you can’t go searching for me and do that at the same time.

As for the book, just write the living shit out of that thing!

!! Tell the people exactly what happened!

Tell them every single thing that happened!

Don’t worry about protecting my dignity or yours—just go full punk rock with it.

Lay it all out there. What use do I have for dignity now?

You don’t need dignity, either, so fuck it.

It’s time for you to write a completely honest book about addiction—yours and mine.

It’ll help some people—so don’t hold back!

I like the title “All the Way to the River”—but what do I know? I’m dead! You should probably ask someone who’s still alive! HA!

Don’t worry, my love—I don’t mind being dead. I kind of dig it.

But I do miss grilling.

You know what else, babe? Looking at you right now, I wish I could get my hands up in your hair, because your roots are fucking hit !

!! Next time you get a keratin treatment, be sure to get the real old-school Brazilian keratin with the formaldehyde in it, cuz it’s the only thing that calms down your frizz and keeps your hair shiny.

Don’t worry about getting liver cancer from the formaldehyde—liver cancer was my thing, not your thing. HA!

Your world is so fucking beautiful! LOOK AT IT! No, really—look at it! It’s so beautiful to behold, it’ll break your heart—but that’s what it’s supposed to do. Let it break your heart. You know I always loved a good heartbreak.

My sunshine baby, you were always my baby—but don’t stay a baby.

Remember that I always loved you as a woman, too—as a beautiful, elegant, strong, creative woman with incredible power.

And nobody can match you for spiritual flame.

Keep chewing off your own legs to get out of any trap that tries to hold you back from freedom …

Be free, my love. Be free, be free! Stay on your path and stay sober!

You can do this! You’re not as fucked up as you think! You can do it! Now is your time to stand on your own two feet. So keep taking care of yourself. Let everyone around you take care of their own lives while you take care of yours. That’s the assignment …

I love you and I know you love me, but don’t hold on to me—don’t ever hold on to anyone or anything again.

Focus on yourself now. Live your own life!

Keep going, my love. Keep going. You’re going all the fucking way this time—all the way to the enlightenment, or whatever you used to call it.

You’ve got everything you need. Your friends are cool, your program is cool, your heart is strong, and your God is rock-fucking-solid.

Don’t ever give yourself away again. You got this.

You’re beautiful. Don’t come looking for me.

Keep going. Stay focused. I love you. I love you. I love you—

Then the pen died and Rayya was gone—as though sucked through an airplane door at six hundred miles an hour.

She always did know how to make a dramatic exit.

I n the silent and sudden aftermath of Rayya’s visitation, my heart raced, then settled.

Tears swelled, then quieted.

And then I got to work.

This book, with its stories, prayers, poems, journal entries, photos, and drawings, is my very best effort to tell the truth about what happened between me and Rayya Elias—our friendship, our romance, our beauty, rage, and pain.

It tells the story of Rayya’s addiction, her relapse, and her death.

It also tells the story of my own addiction and my eventual surrender into recovery.

But this book is not only for people whose lives have been negatively impacted by their own addictions or by the addictions of others—although I do believe those two categories will include pretty much all of us, at some time or another.

This book is also about the many ways that people—despite their best efforts at living sane and stable lives—can sometimes get swept into high-octane dramas and traumas, finding themselves washed up on shores that can feel very distant from their true natures.

How the hell did I get here? is a question that I believe everybody will have to face at some point during their passage through life.

Perhaps even at multiple points. For who among us has never gotten lost, much to our own embarrassment?

Who has not ended up in scenarios that are frightening, alienating, shameful, and spirit-crushing?

Who has not kept secrets, or been betrayed, or tried to control the behavior of others?

Who has not longed for escape from suffering?

And who has not reached for substances, people, behaviors, or distractions that offer temporary respite from the built-in discomforts of existence itself?

What we commonly call an “addict,” I believe, is just an exaggerated version of all of us —just a person so desperately in search of relief from the sting of life that they will use anything (or anyone) to soothe it.

This book is about that search for relief, and how wild and depraved it can make us become.

Even the strongest of us.

Even the bravest.

I hope for your own sake that you have never fallen quite as low as Rayya and I fell at some points during our journey together. But even if your wheels have never fully come off, I suspect, at some level, that I might be you, and that you might be me, and that all of us might be Rayya.

I offer this book with love and respect, then, to anyone who might need it.

The part of me that still struggles with codependency would like to say that Rayya and I wrote it together, but the reality is that she wanted me to do it all by myself—and so I have.

As we say in the rooms of recovery: Take what you like and leave the rest.