Page 34 of All the Way to the River

I do not want to tell this next part of the story.

I had to stop writing this book for a few months when I got to these pages, because I just couldn’t do it.

I tried to distract myself with other things.

I went to Central America for a while, and decided that it was suddenly important that I begin studying Spanish. That’s a good use of one’s time, isn’t it?

I thought about dropping this project altogether and writing an entirely different book about Rayya.

Maybe this could be an experimental novel instead of a memoir—something with poetic language and foggy edges and changed names?

Or maybe it could just be a collection of poetry?

Or maybe I could pivot completely and write a dry, scholarly, scientific book about the history and neurobiology of addiction?

I do not want to tell this part of the story because part of me still doesn’t want it to be true.

I still don’t want Rayya to become who she became toward the end of her life.

I want her to remain how I saw her for all those years before—heroic, brave, commanding, honest, astonishing, cool.

And I still don’t want me to become what I became at the end of her life—desperate, clinging, resentful, lost, powerless, degraded, insane.

I want you, dear reader, to love and admire Rayya, and I want you to love and admire me.

I want you to see us as beautiful and undefeatable.

I want this to be the most inspiring book of the year.

I want this to be a thoughtful book about death and dying, written by a wise and spiritual woman who accepts the reality of mortality with a sense of compassionate detachment.

I want this to be a tale of two courageous and amazing souls who faced down death with a sense of creativity and wild adventure, and who did enough living in the last months of Rayya’s life to resonate love across the cosmos for a thousand more lifetimes.

I want to tell you that our bond was never broken—not even by the ravages of cancer, or by mortality.

I want to forget how things actually went down.

I want this to have been an entirely different love story.

I want, I want, I want —there it is again: the ferocious drumbeat of the ego, pounding away within the blistering furnace of the self.

While meanwhile the truth remains standing in the center of the room—patient and timeless—gazing at me with maddening indifference, waiting for me to address it at last.

So.

Let us surrender now and address that truth.