Page 4 of All the Way to the River

R ayya liked to use a map of downtown New York City as the operative metaphor for her friendships and relationships.

The way she explained it was this.

First, she said, you’ve got your Fifth Avenue friends, who are right in the center of the map.

These are the people you’re completely artificial with.

You only let them see your surface, and they only let you see their surface.

These are your social friends and your professional contacts.

Everyone’s trying to impress each other; no one is telling the truth.

None of the Fifth Avenue friend group really know one another or want to be known.

As you head farther east, though, you’ve got your Fourth and Third Avenue friends.

You’re still polite with these people, but you let them see a little more of your true nature.

You can joke around, be a little loose, share some intimacy.

You’ve probably met their families. Maybe you went to their wedding.

You feel a sincere warmth for these people, but they’re still on the periphery of your heart.

Keep walking and you’ll run into your Second and First Avenue friends.

Now you’re getting somewhere. These people really know you, and you know them.

You’ve got deep history together. Maybe you’ve been neighbors forever.

Maybe you’ve traveled together. Maybe you started businesses together.

You’ve been witness to each other’s successes and failures, and you can be honest and vulnerable with each other.

These are people you can trust, who’ve got your back, who will always be there.

But it isn’t really until you get to your Alphabet City friends, Rayya used to say, that you start to experience real intimacy.

Your Avenue A, B, C, and D friends have been through some shit with you, and they still manage to love you.

These are the people who paid your bail.

These are the people who came to see you when you were in rehab, who know about the affair, who held your head while you were puking, whose couches you slept on during your divorce.

They took the car keys from you when they had to.

You wept in their arms when you lost your job, your mother, your baby, your mind.

You’ve seen each other in hospital waiting rooms, in funeral homes, in abortion clinics.

They called you when they were having an anxiety attack at the airport.

You’ve maybe had some bitter fights or misunderstandings over the years, and maybe had to stop talking to them for a while.

Boundaries have been crossed and recrossed.

You’ve had to forgive each other. These are the realest friends you will ever have in your life.

But the map of New York City hasn’t ended yet.

Keep going.

If you are very lucky, Rayya used to claim, you might find one friend—just one friend—over the course of your whole entire life, who will walk all the way to the East River with you.

This is the friend who knows everything .

This is the person you could never be counterfeit with, even if you tried.

This is the one who can read your face from three blocks away and immediately knows when something is up.

And you know that last awful secret you’ve been hiding from everyone forever?

The one secret you’ve always believed would destroy you if anyone knew about it?

This person knows about it. Hell, they might have even been involved in it.

And yet there’s nothing you could ever do to lose them.

This person is your last phone call in the middle of the night from the void, when you have nowhere else to turn.

Rayya used to say to me: “You’re my all the way to the river friend.”

I was. I proudly was.

And she was mine.

I knew it, she knew it, everyone knew it—and I wore the title like a badge of honor.

So it makes a certain amount of sense that when we discovered Rayya was dying, we began to call her death “the river.”

“I want you to walk with me all the way to the river,” she told me the day she got her terminal cancer diagnosis, and I promised her I would.

“I can’t get into the river with you,” I said, “but I’ll walk you right to the edge of it. I will be with you every step of the way.”

And those words sounded beautiful and soothing to our frightened ears.

But here’s the thing about Rayya’s map metaphor.

If you are familiar with the geography of downtown New York City, you know that walking all the way from Fifth Avenue to the East River is not a very nice walk.

It starts off nice, sure, as you stroll through grand neighborhoods filled with history and charm.

Then it starts to get funky, but in a cool way.

For a while, around First Avenue, it gets fun—colorful, bustling, vibrant, and diverse.

And then it gets gritty. And then it gets sad, as you pass through the failed projects of a city that seems to have abandoned its most vulnerable people.

And then it gets dangerous, as you start looking over your shoulder while dodging used syringes and unconscious drug addicts.

As you draw nearer to the river, it’s not that easy to make the final stretch, because there’s a giant, multilane highway in your path, filled with speeding motorists who give no care to the safety of your fragile little human body.

You’ll have to find your way to the pedestrian overpass, which is not easily located, and which is covered with dog shit and graffiti and does not exactly offer a bucolic vista.

And once you finally make it all way to the river? Well—it’s the East River , folks. It’s a slurry of sewage and plastic and medical waste, covered by a light film of industrial oil and filled with sunken cars and the skeletons of long-dead gangsters.

It’s a perilous journey is what I’m saying, to be somebody’s “all the way to the river” relationship.

There is romance in it, but also danger.

Intimacy at that level is rough . You will see things in yourself and in the other person that will frighten and harm you; and you will experience things that will change you.

I would not have missed my journey with Rayya for anything in the world, but I’m not entirely sure I would recommend it.

And I definitely never want to do anything like that again.

Because while much of that walk was magical, a lot of it was exceedingly unbeautiful and painful to endure, and I’m pretty sure it shaved a few years off my life.

Maybe this is why you can’t know many people in life as well as I knew Rayya.

Maybe—I sometimes contemplate—we’re not even supposed to go all the way to the river with anyone.

Maybe there comes a point where we each have to find our way to the river alone.

And here’s another thing I only recently found out, by the way: What we New Yorkers call the East River is not even a river !

It’s a tidal estuary. Which means it flows in both directions, and its chemistry constantly varies.

Both salty and fresh, it’s generative but changeable.

Polluted water and bright new tides are constantly flowing back and forth across invisible boundaries.

Navigation can become tricky. Extreme brackishness can make underwater visibility low.

Currents are unpredictable. Swimmers and boaters must be careful not to be swept out to sea.

Honestly, you can’t even tell whether this body of water ends at the beginning or begins at the end.

But yes, back to our story.

I promised my beloved friend Rayya Elias that I would walk with her all the way to the river.

And God help us, that is exactly what I did.