Page 54 of All the Way to the River

I took lots of psychedelic drugs during the year after Rayya died.

Like— lots and lots of psychedelic drugs.

These substances were amazing because they gave me the chance to see Rayya again in person—not just to hear her voice in my mind, or to feel her presence, but to actually see and touch her.

Sometimes in these visions her face was moonlit; other times she was the moon itself.

Sometimes she was a dancing, vibrating, beautiful neon-blue line, which I understood to be what music looks like.

Sometimes she was the same white tiger she herself had once glimpsed walking through walls, so soon before her death.

Sometimes she was purple orbs. Sometimes I could feel her arms around me, saying, I’ve got you.

Sometimes on those drugs I became Rayya.

I was able to travel back in time and enter her body and relive the horror of her death.

I was able to experience the unspeakable awfulness of what it feels like to be dying in bed while you can hear your friends laughing and talking in the next room—knowing that life and all its pleasures will go on without you.

The terror and loneliness were devastating.

I wept for Rayya—but I also wept as her.

Another time, when I was flying high on ayahuasca, I got to interview Rayya’s cancer cells.

I summoned them to me (they arrived in a sheepish, shuffling cluster), and I asked them what it had been like to kill her.

I wasn’t angry, I said: I just wanted to know.

They had hated their job, they told me. They had hated being cancer cells, but it was their destiny.

They explained to me how they had lived in Rayya’s body since birth, waiting for the signal instructing them to activate and replicate and commence the process of her death.

They had prayed that the signal would never arrive, because they had come to love Rayya over the years—the way anyone would love their home.

Also, her death, of course, would mean an end to their own lives.

Why would they want that? For many years, then, the cancer cluster had lived quietly in her liver, keeping their heads down, trying to go unnoticed.

But one morning, the signal had come: It’s go time.

“Who sent the signal?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” the shuffling cluster replied. “But we had no choice but to follow the commands we were given.”

I felt sympathy for the cancer cells. I really did. They seemed like decent enough guys, trapped in a literal dead-end job.

Trapped, like all of us, in their own karmic predicament.

Another night—without a trace of drugs in my system but lying in bed exhausted and unable to sleep—I suddenly had a vision in which four sweet-faced angels dressed in white suits (kind of like the 1980s boy band Menudo) came to get me to take me on an adventure.

It was an astonishingly vivid vision. One moment I was in my bed, wide awake and agitated, and in the next moment the Menudo angels were transporting me to an alternate universe.

They landed me in a modest, sunny apartment on St. Marks Place, in the East Village.

They told me that this is where Rayya and I were currently living together as a married couple—in this apartment that I had never before seen but that also seemed deeply familiar.

This was a different universe, I grasped, from what I had always understood to be “reality”—but it was also happening right now and felt every bit as real and true as the world in which I actually lived.

In this alternate universe—I immediately comprehended—Rayya and I had gotten together as a couple back in the year 2000, shortly after we met.

We had built a life together, and it was a good life.

Now it was the current day, and she was alive, and we were happy.

I was still a journalist; she was still doing hair.

Eat Pray Love had never happened; Harley Loco had never happened.

We’d been living for twenty years in this bright little rental apartment in a crumbling old brownstone on the south side of the street, right across from Cafe Mogador, where we often went for breakfast. It was a humble existence but a sweet one.

She was sober; I was sober. And it was just as real as the world I had always known to be “true.”

In this vision, I got to talk to Rayya while she washed dishes at the sink and while the four white-suited angels at the table watched us and smiled. I knew we were planning to go on a trip, because our suitcases were packed by the door—but I didn’t know where we were going.

“But this is real , isn’t it?” I kept asking the angels. “This isn’t a dream, and I’m not on drugs, right? This is happening, isn’t it? I’m actually right here.”

The angels beamed at me and nodded.

“But Rayya,” I said to her, “you died already. You died on January 4th. I was there! I watched you die. I don’t understand what’s happening right now. How are you also here, and still alive?”

“Dude, stop asking questions. You’ll never be able to get it.”

“But how does this all work , though?” I asked the angels. “How can I come back here? How many other universes are there?”

“Don’t bother trying to explain any of this to her, you guys,” Rayya said to the angels, who just shrugged at me with sweet compassion. “She’ll never be able to understand.”

And to me she said, “You’ll never figure this one out, babe. Just hang out and enjoy being with me here in the moment.”

Then, in the very next instant, I was gone—transported back to my bed again, back to this world.

Alone and bereft.

This vision of our home on St. Marks Place was so tactile and real (right down to the art on the walls and the rugs on the floor) that as soon as I possibly could, I drove to the East Village to see the location in person.

Perhaps I hoped that I might encounter Rayya there—that I could walk up the stoop and through the peeling red door and then up the narrow old staircase to the third floor, where I knew that our apartment was located behind the first door on the left.

Perhaps I hoped that I would find her there, alive and well, washing the dishes and packing for a trip.

But there was no building in the spot that I had seen in my vision.

Across from Cafe Mogador, there is nothing but an empty lot—the only empty lot on the whole block, in fact.

The empty lot gapes like a spot in a mouth where a tooth used to be.

And a giant graffiti painting of an exploding black crow looks over the vacant spot.

When I saw that our home was gone—that our home had never been—I wept and wept, right there on the street.

Is this what grieving looks like?

Was I doing it right? Was I doing it wrong?

I don’t know.

This is what grieving looked like for me.

“How is Liz doing?” someone asked a family member of mine during this time.

“Liz is amazing” came the answer. “Liz is doing great.”

What else would they think, given how I was presenting myself? Producing and hustling and putting on a good face and searching for escape: That had been my survival formula since the beginning of forever, and it was keeping me alive again now.

Meanwhile, as all this was going on, my unhealed sex and love addiction sat quietly in a dimly lit corner of my mind, and it did what addiction always does: It waited.

Patiently it watched me spin and toil, and patiently it waited for me to collapse.

My addiction watched me overwork, it watched me overperform, it watched me grieve.

It watched me drink and take drugs. It watched me demand answers to the workings of the universe.

It watched me exhaust myself in service and devotion to someone who wasn’t even there anymore.

It watched me get knocked down by wave after wave of grief. It watched me cry out in my sleep.

As I became more depleted, my addiction grew—until it was sleeker and stronger and more powerful than ever.

And in the rare moments when I stopped working, or when I was too overwhelmed with fatigue to fight it, my addiction started talking to me again.

It said the same things it has always said.

It said: Go out there and find somebody.

It said: You deserve some relief .

It said: Bring me someone.

It said: Feed me.