Page 42 of All the Way to the River

N early six years after her death, sitting here alone on a quiet morning, I can still hear Rayya’s ferocious and radioactive words echoing through my head.

I wish we’d never gotten together.

It was a long time before I could recall those words without falling to pieces. It still hurts a bit, but it feels like an old bruise—not the fatal wound that it seemed to be on the day she said it.

Mostly, I just feel sympathy for the both of us—and for the other people I had dragged into our theater of pain.

It was such a horrible mess, and we were in so far over our heads.

I can imagine me and Rayya sitting together someday in the afterlife in the great cosmic boardroom, freeze-framing that moment in time and processing it together, without our human egos in the way.

I can imagine us talking about it honestly and openly—the way, at our best, we used to be able to talk about anything.

I can imagine her telling me that she was blasted out of her mind on drugs and fear, and that of course she didn’t mean anything she said.

I can hear her reminding me that, only moments before telling me she had never wanted a romantic relationship with me, she had also said, “Since when is cocaine even addictive?”—so is that someone you even want to be listening to?

Of course she loved me.

Of course she was happy that we had gotten to have our love story, as fleeting as it had been.

But I can also imagine this—and it’s taken me many years of grieving and recovery to arrive at this point: I can imagine me saying to her, “You know what, Rayya? You might have been right about the things you said that day. You made some fair points there, ugly as it was.”

Because I had thrown myself at her—this was true.

What’s more, I had thrown myself at her while she was still reeling from the news of a terminal cancer diagnosis—which was perhaps a romantic and brave gesture, or might have been an unbelievably selfish and emotionally manipulative thing to do to someone when they were at their most vulnerable. Depends on how you see it, I guess.

And I am a lot of trouble to deal with sometimes.

I know this to be true, because it has been pointed out to me by many other partners in my life (thanks, fellas!), and I don’t think they were wrong.

The only partners who didn’t think I was a lot of trouble were the ones whom I never authentically showed myself to—the ones whom I never allowed to really know me.

And I bet it was a more pleasant experience for Rayya to be my friend than to be my romantic partner—given that once she became my romantic partner, I most definitely did hold her responsible for all my “emotional bullshit.” But that was only because I had decided somewhere along the way that it was Rayya’s responsibility to keep me safe from the world and to settle my nerves for me—even as she was facing her own death and dealing with her own pain and terror.

I did all that.

I did that to my beloved friend.

And Rayya, my Rayya—I am so terribly sorry.

But somehow this morning, writing these words, it’s all okay.

It’s all okay because things could not have been otherwise, given who we both were and where we had both come from, how much we were both suffering.

But that’s not how I saw it then.

I was devastated by what she said.

I took a cab uptown that night to my friend Sheryl’s apartment and took refuge there.

It had been many years since I’d been reduced to sleeping on a friend’s couch because of a relationship blowup—but here we were again!

(Me, to the couch: “Hello, old friend.”) And for the next few weeks, I hid myself away, brooding and miserable, feeling extremely sorry for myself.

Rayya had delivered a perfect death blow—because she, of all people, knew just how to kill me.

She knew exactly where my deepest insecurities were hidden.

She knew I’d received messages since childhood that my “emotional bullshit” was too much trouble for anyone to deal with.

She knew I was terrified that I would always drive away the people I loved by being too needy, too clingy.

She knew I’d spent most of my life trying to show people only the “good parts” of me because I was sure that if they saw the pain and fear and need that lurked below the surface, they would find me repulsive and reject me.

She had in fact witnessed the most unlovable parts of me, and had once seemed to love them.

But now she was telling the truth: I was disgusting, and she hated me .

And it was with that wicked, blistering sentence—“I wish we’d never gotten together”—that Rayya had taken the last bits of my broken heart and ground them beneath the heel of her motorcycle boot, pulverizing me into grains even finer than cocaine.

Grinding me down until there was nothing left of me.

And that was exactly what she’d meant to do to me—for daring to confront her.

At first, I was unspeakably sad about what she’d said, but then I became enraged.

Who the hell was she to talk to me like that?

She was the one who was “too much fucking trouble to deal with” if anyone was!

She was the disgusting junkie, not me! She wasn’t just a junkie; she was a thief .

She had stolen time from us—precious time that could never be replaced.

She had stolen herself from me. How dare she destroy my “most beautiful story”?

It didn’t help matters at all that I kept getting messages from friends and neighbors downtown, reporting that Rayya was really partying it up back in our apartment—which was still in our possession for another month.

Apparently the only people she wanted to see anymore were those who would get drunk and do coke with her—and maybe share some of the opioids, too.

Meanwhile, I was camped out on someone’s couch, weeping and angry, suffering complete emotional withdrawal—and still paying the bills!

My drug of choice having been yanked from my hands, I had now reached the final destination of a codependent’s unrestrained binge: total collapse.

Years earlier, Rayya had told me, regarding her own many relapses, that it never mattered how glamorous or fun or exciting the first taste of the drug was; in the end, she would always end up in the same place—alone, empty, degraded.

That first hit of cocaine might be enjoyed at a record producer’s party in a mansion on a Los Angeles mountainside, surrounded by beautiful models, listening to the coolest music, dancing on a moonlit terrace overlooking a sparkling city.

But the last hit would always be taken alone on a bathroom floor, ruined, with nothing left but the shame.

It’s the same with love addiction. It always begins in a state of ecstasy—soaring through the cosmos on a comet’s trail of starry-eyed fantasy, disappearing into somebody else’s beauty and breath and being and body, feeling no pain because you have flown so far beyond the limits of mortality.

And it always ends the same way—alone on a bathroom floor, ruined, with nothing left but the suffering.

Rayya was still flying high on her relapse, but I had already hit rock bottom with mine, and it hurt .

Here’s the thing about withdrawal, from any drug, substance, person, or behavior: The reason it’s so excruciating is that not only do you have to feel the pain of losing access to that thing you desire more than anything else, but you also have to feel the pain of every other loss you have ever experienced along your life’s journey.

All the previous failures, all the previous crashes, all the previous disappointments: It’s like a twenty-car pileup of failures on an icy highway—and there’s no way to get away from it.

Worst of all, withdrawal forces you to feel your original suffering again—the deepest childhood grief or ancestral wound that started you out on this journey of addiction in the first place.

And who wants to feel that ?

Not me.

Not most people, to be honest.

My friend the writer and teacher Kemi Nekvapil was once asked by an interviewer, “If you could make everyone on earth do one thing, what would it be?”

And Kemi replied, “If there’s one thing I wish everyone would do—one thing that would actually change the world—it would be to heal .”

But healing is hard. Healing is expensive, time-consuming, and painful—whether it’s physical or emotional healing. This is why so many people cannot and will not heal. Instead, they use , in order to not have to feel their suffering. And when using doesn’t work, you can always just blame .

So that’s what I did in the late summer of 2017, while Rayya got high in our fancy apartment: I blamed .

The affront upon which I fixated the fullest intensity of my rage was this: Rayya was now apparently telling our friends that I had “bailed” on her because I “couldn’t fucking handle” her cancer.

When I heard about this, I went nearly blind with fury.

Most of our friends knew better than to believe her, but some people bought into her version of events—and that really killed me.

My precious, precious reputation as the best person in the world was very much at stake here, and there are very few things that will make me hate someone more than when they threaten my favorite delusions about myself.

I spent hours that summer furiously arguing my case against Rayya to anyone who would listen—or, even more insanely, to nobody at all .

I stomped through the city, practicing and perfecting ferocious anti-Rayya speeches inside my head, or sometimes even aloud.

Scaring the children on the sidewalk as I stormed by.

Making crowds of pigeons scatter in my furious wake.

I had done everything for Rayya— everything !

I had given up my entire life for her! I had left my marriage for her—thrown away my whole existence for her!

I had given up money, property, and prestige for her!

And I had taken care of her every need when she got sick!

And all the while, I had been making her wildest dreams come true!

I had taken her everywhere she ever wanted to go, bought her everything she had ever desired!

Let’s go back further in my list of resentments: It was because of me that she had even become a writer ! She never would’ve been able to do that without me—and where was her goddamn gratitude?

Let’s go back even further —I had given her a place to live after her divorce! For free ! When I didn’t even know her!

Even she had said at the time, “Who does something like this for someone they don’t even know?”

Yeah, bitch—who does do something like that for someone they don’t even know?

And this was the thanks I got in return, for all my years of love and sacrifice and generosity and holy selflessness?

This fucking bullshit ?

In conclusion: FUCK HER.