The last days of December 2009 I was back in California. It was winter break from teaching my 3/3 load as a visiting professor at Bucknell and I had convinced my boyfriend to join me back home. We rented a little bungalow in Silver Lake. I was sick but it was unclear of what. I decided to do what I had done two years before and then a few years before that, each with different boyfriends: propose Death Valley for NYE. It was always my favorite place. At that time I did not know that it was a destination for the chronically ill—the lowest point in North America having also the most oxygen and pristine landscape. We packed up and headed to Furnace Creek, a lux old castle-looking thing in the middle of the lunar landscape of Death Valley National Park. We immediately went on hikes in place with names like the Devil’s Hole and Badwater Basin and we booked NYE dinner at the fancy hotel restaurant. The whole time I fell ill at ease as that past summer this boyfriend of mine had promised we’d be engaged by the year’s end. And here it was: nothing. I was ill at ease because I was worried at the last minute he would pop the question and I would have to tell him the truth: no.

But he didn’t. Not then. It would be another year and I would say yes. Mostly out of fear.

I don’t remember why but during that trip we had some of our most horrible fights—screaming, chaos, me at one point jumping out of our speeding car. I remember us on a cliff with our fists beating the air, dangerously hovering near the edges. This was of course after he had thrown me down a flight of stairs the summer I was fighting my first battle with Lyme and this was before he had broken a door on my head in New Mexico. (What was edited out of my memoir, thanks to the legal team.) That love of ours I still don’t understand.

Everyone loved him. He looked like a Disney prince. He was smart. He could ski like a pro. He enunciated. He could do card tricks. He went to an Ivy League. He meditated.

What they didn’t know was he would tell me to stop ordering food because I had had enough. What they didn’t know was that he would tell me after reading my second novel draft that he didn’t understand how a person so beautiful could write something so ugly. What they didn’t know was his coffee thermos was full of liquor during office hours and all that work he was doing on his book was online poker. I didn’t know either. I sometimes wonder what else I didn’t know.

But I don’t wonder too much as I don’t think of him too much. This man who I thought in my 30s had defined my whole life now just feels like a blip. It’s a struggle to remember his voice.

But I look at this photo, me staring not at the camera but in his eyes. A sort of quiet resignation, tinge of amusement, peaceful knowledge maybe that this will be pass. The future would not be perfect but it would be something bigger than my imagination and that vision could not hold someone as small as him.

Maybe we outlast everyone who held us back, may we outgrow our smallest selves, may we become too big for the frame.

[Britney Spears, London, 2002]