She was color-blind: how else could she have missed them?

The red flags, they were everywhere, waving right in front of her, but she saw them as harmless shades of pink. Maybe even white. Innocent. Forgivable. Love had tinted her world in warm hues, softening the edges of warnings she should have heeded.

The first red flag? He never apologized. Not truly. When he hurt her, it was her fault for being too sensitive, too emotional, too much. "You know how I am," he would say, as if that excused everything. And she would nod, swallowing her hurt, and in those moments she would despised herself for being the cause of it all, for demanding too much.

The second? He hated her friends. They were "jealous," he told her, "toxic" and "meddling." She, desperate to prove her love, burned every bridge they had tried to build for her escape. She fought them, called them disloyal when they warned her. "You don’t understand him," she argued. "You don’t see what I see."

The third? He made her question herself. Her dreams became inconveniences, her laughter too loud, her independence a threat. The things she once loved: her books, her solitude, her ambition; shrunk beneath his expectations. And when she changed to fit into his world, he still found her lacking.

More red flags followed. The way his love was conditional. The way he always had excuses but never solutions. The way she could be standing right in front of him yet feel miles away.

The nights spent waiting for a call that never came. The unexplained absences, the vague answers, the gut feeling she silenced because trusting him was easier than facing the truth. The way he could be so sweet one moment, then cold the next, making her chase the warmth like a child reaching for fireflies in the dark.

Then realization came like a storm after the wreckage: too late to change anything.

She had walked too far down a path that no longer belonged to her, lost in a love that had cost her too much. She had given up so many pieces of herself that when she looked in the mirror, she no longer recognized the woman staring back.

Her world had become smaller, dimmer. Her laughter, once unrestrained, now sounded foreign even to her own ears. She had thought love was supposed to make her feel full, but all it had done was leave her hollow.

And now, she didn’t know where to go.

Because when you lose yourself in someone else, how do you even begin to find your way back?