My Once-in-a-Million Years Love Story

When my BEST FRIEND was diagnosed with terminal CANCER. I confessed my feelings and promised to be with her until the end. Then ALL HELL broke loose.

- Elizabeth Gilbert

With Rayya

On APRIL 25, 2016, I got a phone call from Rayya. “Are you sitting down?” she asked, just like people do in the movies. I sat down. “They found tumors,” she said. “Lots of them. Not just in my liver. In my pancreas, too.” The breath left my body and for a long moment did not come back.

Rayya Elias had been my best friend for years. But she was more than just a friend. She was my confidante, my consigliere, my bodyguard, my safe person. She was my first phone call in any emergency and also at any moment of celebration. My dependence upon her was absolute. The other truth was that I was in love with Rayya, but I'd been hiding that fact from her (and from my husband and even from myself) for many years by that point, unwilling to disturb the delicate ecosystem of our friendship or to jeopardize our other relationships. But with that phone call, I knew that everything would have to change.

On the day that I finally told Rayya the truth—that I had loved her for many years and that I wanted to be with her until she died—we had never so much as kissed. After a long silence, she opened her eyes and smiled. She gathered me up in her arms and said, “Baby, my baby. My beautiful baby, why did you take so long to come to me?”

It feels weird now, and somehow clinical, to call it “sex”—what Rayya and I did that first night we were alone together in bed. I knew that Rayya hated it when girls kissed her too softly and “weakly,” but she also hated it when anyone other than she took charge in bed. So I was more than happy to kiss her strongly and let her take charge of everything else.

I fell asleep just before the sun came up, but Rayya didn't end up sleeping at all. She told me later that she'd been overcome by such a wild energy—an energy so ferocious and specific and primal—that she couldn't possibly rest. She thought she would explode, she said, if she tried to lie still beside me.