Page 44 of All the Way to the River

A ddiction serves a purpose.

It is medication for an aching soul, relief for a pained body, and escape from an impossible mind.

Addiction is a pretty good survival strategy when all your other strategies for living have failed.

As Rayya used to tell me, “I needed every gram of heroin I ever took back in the day, or I would have never made it out of my childhood alive. I could not have survived without my buffer of drugs.”

The addicts I’ve loved over the years—and heaven knows I have always loved addicts—are among the most sensitive, creative, kind, and spiritual people I have ever met. They often become addicts because they can’t help feeling everything, and that hurts like hell.

They are beautiful and heartbreaking, and I love them.

They are lightning rods for intensity and drama—which is why they feel like home to me—and I love them.

I am an addict, too, and I love us .

We addicts can be some of the best people out there, and we can also totally be the worst. We are artists, liars, lovers, criminals, users, over givers, over-takers, over-doers.

Gloriously generous, devastatingly untrustworthy.

We have created some of the most beautiful things in the world, but we can also do sickening things to people.

We are perfect in God’s eyes—absolutely perfect—and we should never be ashamed of ourselves, because all we are ever trying to do is survive our circumstances.

But for anyone out there whose life is being ruined by an active addict right now, please allow me to say the one thing that I don’t think gets said strongly enough or often enough: It’s okay for you to leave them.

Don’t get me wrong: Addicts are precious and suffering children of God, and they do not deserve your contempt.

But if you can ever save yourself from one— run .

That’s what Rayya used to tell me, anyway, back when she was sober—or at least semisober.

It has nothing to do with love, she said.

Nothing to do with loyalty. Of course you love them, and you will always love them!

But having the courage to cut off contact with an active addict is often the only way to survive their rampages—and it just might be the wake-up call that the addict needs, too.

I remember once listening to Rayya counsel a friend whose younger brother was lost in heroin addiction.

This woman kept trying to save her beloved sibling by paying for one rehab after another, by trying to get him jobs, by bailing him out of jail, by letting him borrow her car, sleep on her couch, exploit her financially, use her soft heart as a landing pad.

She was wrung out by years of heartbreak. And she was very nearly out of money.

I remember Rayya reaching across the kitchen table for this exhausted woman’s hand and saying, “Listen, babe. Let me break it down for you—and you gotta believe me, because I know what I’m talking about here: You don’t have a brother anymore .

He’s already gone. You need to understand this.

There is no more brother, okay? What you have now is a vampire.

I know it’s confusing, because this guy looks like your brother, and he sounds like your brother, but it’s a vampire.

And that vampire will drain you of every dime and possession you have, and then he will discard you once there’s nothing left to take.

And trust me—that vampire doesn’t give a shit about you.

So you better start giving a shit about you, or else you’re gonna wake up one morning and discover that everything in your life is gone, including him. ”

“But he could die if I cut him off!” the woman protested.

“Your brother is already dead,” Rayya told her. “And you might need to grieve that. But the only question now is whether he will ever decide to come back to life. That’s a matter between him and God. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

I also heard her tell somebody once, “You can love an active addict, sure—but they can’t love you back.”

And I remember asking Rayya—many, many years before her final relapse—if there was anything that somebody could have said or done, back in the day, that might have convinced her to quit drugs sooner.

She replied, “The only thing that might have made me get clean sooner would have been if every person in my life had cut me off sooner. Because as long as I still had anyone left out there who I could bullshit and use, or borrow money from, or crash with, or who would listen to my sob story, there was no reason for me to quit. It wasn’t until I had burned every bridge, and there was nobody left who would even pick up the phone when I called, that I really had to face myself and decide whether I wanted to live or die.

But I had to do that alone, when there was nobody left to manipulate.

If I’d gotten to that place sooner, I might have quit sooner. ”

All this was on my mind in the time I spent camped out at my friend’s apartment. In my rare moments of quiet, I kept hearing Rayya’s voice. The old Rayya, I mean.

My friend Rayya, whose strength and wisdom I had never missed more.

I felt like I could hear her calling me toward reality, toward honesty, toward sanity.

It was the weirdest thing.

I felt like I was dealing with two Rayyas here: There was the Rayya of the Present, who was a cruel and destructive junkie; and then there was the Rayya of the Past, who had spent many years teaching me how to deal with cruel and destructive junkies, in case I should ever encounter one.

In the great karmic playbook, it was as if the Rayya of the Past had been steadily feeding me lessons that I would someday need in order to handle the Rayya of the Present—almost as if she had known all along what was coming and had been preparing me for it from the beginning.

That’s some real Obi-Wan Kenobi shit right there, and it was kind of blowing my mind.

But this moment wasn’t merely about my figuring out how to handle Rayya; it was also about my figuring out how to take back some of the power that I had given her over my own life.

Which was supremely ironic, because Rayya had been trying to teach me for years how not to give my power away.

All those times when she had coached me about how to stand up to people, how to defend my boundaries, how to know my own worth and speak my own truth—what had that been for, if not preparation for this very scene?

“I will not rest,” Rayya used to say, “until I see you standing on your own two feet in every circumstance of your life.”

Since she had gotten cancer, in fact, she’d been saying this more and more often.

“I will not leave this earth until we are both ready,” she promised me at the onset of her illness. “I refuse to die until I know for sure that you can take care of yourself without me.”

How could this be the same person who was now exploiting and hurting me?

It was too much .

Yet there were moments, even amid all the dissonance of that awful summer, when I thought I could see something mysterious moving behind all this drama—something that was nearly out of frame, something that shimmered right at the furthest edges of my comprehension.

Something that I might call the Hand of God.

There were moments—when I was able to steady my heartbeat and step back even one inch from my furious codependent entanglement with Rayya—when I was starting to get the feeling that this whole situation might be a divine setup.

What else could it be?

Think about it: Rayya Elias was the only person in the world who had ever made me feel completely safe—and now she had turned against me and had become the single most dangerous person in my life.

Doesn’t that seem a little too on the nose to be accidental?

Yes, it was a nightmare—but perhaps it was a perfectly engineered nightmare, orchestrated by a power greater than myself in order to usher in the possibility of awakening. What if this nightmare was happening not to me, in other words, but for me?

Couldn’t it be so?

The nineteenth-century poet and philosopher Frederic W.

H. Myers was once asked by a friend, “What is the thing which above all others you would like to know? If you could ask the Sphinx one question, and only one, what would the question be?” And Myers replied, “I think it would be this: Is the universe friendly?”

(This quote is often scrambled up and misattributed to Albert Einstein—perhaps because Einstein himself grappled with this question, and ultimately came to his own conclusion: “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.”)

As I contemplated what was happening between me and Rayya that summer—the chaos, disappointment, and anger—I was forced to ask myself what, in fact, I believed to be true about the universe: Is it friendly, or is it malicious?

It was an important question, because I knew the answer would profoundly affect how I perceived everything that was going on here.

If it was a malicious universe—or even an indifferent universe—then life was nothing but useless suffering.

If it was a friendly universe, then suffering might have its uses.

“God gives the brightest students the toughest assignments,” a sweet old lady had said to me in a twelve-step meeting only the week before, and I’d kind of wanted to punch her in the face for it at the time—but what if it was true ?

What if this apparent disaster was just my next Earth School assignment, specially curated for my own growth?

What if Rayya was playing her role perfectly in our strange cosmic drama—volunteering to act out this horrible story in order to give me the chance to find my own strength?

What if her final act of love was to hurt me so badly that I would be faced with the choice to either tank alongside her or be jolted into my next level of evolution?

And what if my final act of love to her was to refuse to play into her manipulations?

I mean, it was either that or I was Rayya’s victim—and that interpretation just seemed too degrading and stupid to bear.

Especially since I’d heard Rayya say many, many times in the past, when I was feeling abused by someone, “There are no victims in this room, babe. It’s time for you to grow a pair and stand up for yourself. ”

Could I stand up for myself, though?

Could I become the provider of my own emotional security? Could I stand up to bullies and boundary pushers without Rayya there as my bodyguard? Could I stand up to Rayya herself, when she became the bully and the boundary pusher?

I had never believed I could do any of those things.

Perhaps Rayya didn’t, either.

But what better way for the universe to show both of us what I was made of than to turn Rayya against me?

When I started to see the story this way, a feeling arose in me that I can only call wonder .

Wonder at the powerful, urgent machinery of the universe.

Wonder that was mixed, I must confess, with a growing sense of dread.

Because once I began to see this situation as a divinely appointed challenge, there was no doubt whatsoever about what I would have to do next.

Goddamn it, for fuck’s sake.

I would have to face down the vampire.