Page 38 of All the Way to the River

I decided I would kill her.

I am not talking here about a mercy killing, or euthanasia, or the arguably courageous act of helping someone who is in great suffering to have a death with dignity.

Rayya, at that point, most certainly did not want to die, and she no longer gave a shit about her dignity.

All she wanted to do was consume as much cocaine, alcohol, prescription drugs, and cigarettes as she could get her hands on; to monologue about how amazing and powerful she was for defying all the doctors’ prognoses about her “expiration date” (never once acknowledging that perhaps the reason she was living so long was because I was taking care of her every need ); to constantly find creative new places to hide her drugs from “the cops” who she had become certain were spying on us; to send text messages at all hours to the sweet-faced East Village teenagers who were bringing the cocaine right to our door; to doze off while smoking cigarettes in bed, until the sheets and pillowcases smoldered from her dropped embers; to pick hallucinated worms and bugs off her hot, itching skin; and to tell me what a total fucking failure I was as a human being for not taking better care of her.

And because she would not sleep, I could not sleep.

Every time I shut my eyes, she shook me awake and demanded that I pay attention to her, or bring her something she needed, or listen to speeches about how great she was and how terrible I was.

She wasn’t even really experiencing physical suffering anymore, because she was so incredibly altered that she couldn’t feel anything .

So, no—Rayya did not want to die.

But I wanted her to die.

Not to put her out of her misery but to put me out of my misery.

Because I couldn’t see any other way to get free!

She was a full-on junkie at this point, destroying both my life and hers, but what could I do—stage an intervention?

Try to scare her straight? Send her to rehab?

What rehab would even take her, a terminal cancer patient who needed to take opioids in order to manage her pain?

Hell, not even hospice would put up with her anymore at this point.

What possible threat or incentive did I have to get her clean?

A warning that she might die? She was already dying.

This was her ace of spades, her ultimate trump card.

Her death sentence made her untouchable and invincible—not to mention emotionally manipulative, because there’s nothing quite like spitting out the words “You don’t understand what it feels like to be dying ” to shut up any friend or loved one who dares to question your life choices.

As somebody whose formidable ego had spent many years saying, “This is my fucking life and I get to do whatever I want,” Rayya was, in a perverse way, absolutely winning here.

Of course, she was also absolutely losing here—in that she indeed was dying, and that every one of the noble attainments she had earned through her years of sobriety (her honesty, her integrity, her empathy, her decency) was being utterly gutted by the corrosive evils of her addiction.

And who was gonna stop her? Me? The world’s most spineless enabler? The Olympic Codependency Champion of 2017? Little Miss Duck Fluff—a blondie from Connecticut with puppy-dog eyes and a desperate eagerness to be loved and validated and to make everyone happy?

No.

I was trapped in hell, and I believed that things could not possibly get worse.

And then things got worse.

In the midst of all this mess, I received a letter from our landlord saying that he had sold our apartment and that we would need to move out within the next two months.

This was shocking news, because I’d written to him only a few months earlier, explaining that my partner had terminal cancer and that it would be a blessing if we didn’t have to move at the end of our lease, given the unpredictability of her condition.

I’d even offered to pay him extra money if he could let us stay for another year so we would be sure to have a stable home.

He had expressed sympathy for our situation and had promised that he had no intention of asking us to leave.

But now, he explained, he’d gotten an offer he couldn’t refuse.

He was very sorry, but we would have to go.

So now I had to figure out how to move my paranoid, hallucinating, abusive, drug-addled terminal cancer patient to a new living space.

Then things got worse still: Hackers broke into my bank account and stole all my money, and I had to call the FBI to help me get it back.

Please imagine how all this news landed upon my coked-up, delirious, suspicious junkie girlfriend.

“The feds ?” she howled, her pupils so dilated that her eyes looked almost completely black. “Not on my watch do you talk to the fucking feds!”

There’s a word for all of this—for the chaos and madness and sorrow that were going on for me in the summer of 2017—and that word is unmanageable .

Here’s another good test of whether you might be trapped in an addic tion of some sort, or sucked into a codependent maelstrom.

Ask yourself: Has your life become unmanageable?

When you are in the grip of addiction, or when you are severely impacted by someone else’s addiction, eventually nothing works—not even the things that don’t seem obviously related to the addictive substance or behavior.

Losing the lease to our apartment and getting my bank account hacked had nothing to do with the fact that Rayya was drugged out of her mind, or that I was lost in a dense fog of codependency—but these are also the kinds of things that happen when your life is falling apart.

Suddenly it’s raining hammers. Everything unravels.

You sprain your ankle, your car breaks down, your dog dies.

You can’t handle anything . And that’s when the madness really sets in, because it seems like the world itself is a machine of pain that has turned its full force against you.

I don’t see it that way anymore, of course. In fact, what I have come to believe about the summer of 2017 is not that the world had turned against me but that I had turned against the world .

Meaning: I believe there is a right and natural order of things—the Tao, the path, a way of living in easeful alignment with the drift and movement of the universe—and I was moving in exactly the opposite direction.

If the universe can be said to want anything from us, I now believe, it is that we position ourselves to exist in harmony with reality—to sway in accordance with destiny, without excessive argument or struggle.

But I was fighting . I was fighting against Rayya, fighting against the nature of addiction, fighting against the looming presence of her death and the unraveling of her mind.

I was trying to force reality to bend to my will by insisting that I would either get my “most beautiful story,” goddamn it, or I would kill anyone who kept it from me.

I was trying to control things that could not be controlled—trying to control a person who could not be controlled—and that’s why everything in my life was falling apart …

and still, I would not surrender my will.

It was in this climate of ferocious insanity that I decided I had to murder Rayya.

I came up with the plan late one night when she had been awake for many hours, staring into a mirror with her eye only one inch away from the reflective surface, yelling at the demon that she swore she could see in her eye’s reflection—a demon who, she kept insisting, “lives all the way down there at the bottom of my brain.”

“It’s you again!” she was shouting at the demon. “You again! You stole my fucking Rolex this time!”

It was not easy to sleep through this rant, especially when she kept waking me up and making me come to the bathroom and stare in the mirror with her to prove that the demon was indeed right there inside her eye and that, moreover, the demon was wearing her watch.

(Needless to say, her watch was on her wrist the whole time, so I suppose it’s pretty obvious who the demon in the mirror actually was.)

“Motherfucker thinks it can fuck with me,” muttered Rayya. “Doesn’t know who it’s fucking with, does it, babe? You tell it. You tell it who it’s fucking with. I’m Rayya fucking Elias, that’s who I am. You tell it, babe. You tell it!”

She has to die now , said my exhausted mind—and suddenly this seemed like a terrific solution.

After all, Rayya was dying already anyway, right?

I just needed to move the process along before things got even worse, before she set the whole building on fire with a dropped cigarette or got us both arrested.

She had to die, and I was the one who had to kill her.

I decided I would do it the next day.

I went back to sleep that night in peace, knowing that liberation was finally in sight.

I want to make something extremely clear here: When I say that I once planned to murder Rayya, I don’t mean that the idea simply crossed my mind that my life would be easier if she were gone.

I mean that I fully intended to kill her.

And I tell this story in all its raw honesty, because I want people to understand how insane codependency can make a person be come.

I mean, I’m the nice lady who wrote Eat Pray Love .

And I came very close to premeditatedly and cold-bloodedly murdering my partner because she had taken her affection away from me, and because I was extremely tired.

That’s the sort of person I become when I’m in my insanity.