Everyone talks about missing the red flags. I didn’t miss a single one. I just kept painting them white.
It’s been a month since I ended it.
I won’t say it’s been easy. There are days the loneliness wraps around me and the grief of the dream of us gnaws until I almost give in. There are days I go looking for the paint. But the worst ones are where I remember I knew. I remember that I saw all of it, right from the start…and I stayed anyway.
Losing Clover broke me in ways I didn’t know were possible. Ways that haunt me almost every night, and that I wish I could forget. I needed him. Not to fix anything. Not to save me. I just needed someone there. Someone to say, “You don’t have to carry this alone.”
When I broke down on the phone that day, what came back was a story about him. How nobody understood what it took to keep a business going. How hard the deliveries were. How the customers were never satisfied.
I’d called so I wouldn’t have to carry it alone. And still, he was the lonely one. The one no one checked in on. Either.
As my tears quietly fell, I realised that when my life got real, when I stopped being a beach holiday, when I needed steadiness…when I needed substance… there was none to be found.
It wasn’t the first time. If I’m honest, it had never been there to begin with. I’d told myself I was still learning him. But you don’t learn a person who rewrites themselves every week. I’d stopped trusting his words long before I let myself say so, and I’d been watching his hands instead — and his hands never did what his words had promised. What I’d taken for a man I didn’t know yet was a surface, kept up with care. There was nothing underneath it for me to reach.
Yet I had always found a way — a reason, or a later I could believe in. But that takes something. It takes paint. And with Clover gone, Daisy hanging in the balance, and every last ounce of me focussed on getting the two of us from one day to the next, there was none left. Not a drop.
I was on the floor. The flag stayed red. I simply couldn’t paint it one more time.
The story I told for a long time was that I hadn’t seen them. That love had blinded me. That I’d been fooled. None of it is true. I saw them from the very beginning. I knew, in the plain and wordless way you know these things, that it wouldn’t work. That we didn’t align. That somewhere in it I was being asked to be a version of myself I didn’t recognise and didn’t much like. I knew on day one.
And then it was good…oh so good…so good that the knowing didn’t stand a chance.
That’s the part no one warns you about. The wrong thing isn’t wrong all the way through. If it were, leaving would be simple, and it’s never simple. It’s the good days that keep you. The mornings that felt like the whole life you’d been promised. The version of him that turned up just often enough to make the rest feel like weather, like something that would pass if I was patient enough, good enough, still enough.
So I stayed. And I painted.
I had one colour of paint, and it was always the future. When we’ve been together a bit longer. When we know each other better. When things settle. I said these to myself so many times they stopped sounding like hope and started sounding like fact. I didn’t paint the flags white with a lie, exactly. I painted them with later. I told myself the red was temporary, that it would fade on its own once we’d finally earned the thing I was certain was waiting underneath.
I didn’t paint the flags white with a lie. I painted them with later.
I wasn’t staying for him. I can see that now. I was staying for the man I’d decided he was going to become, and for the us we’d be once all my patience paid out. I fell in love with a forecast.
The flag I painted whitest of all was never even one of his. It was mine.
There’s an old story we tell about love, so old we’ve stopped hearing it as a story at all. That each of us arrives as a half, incomplete by design, and that somewhere out there is the other half, and the whole business of a life is the finding of it. I believed it without ever deciding to. A person isn’t finished, the story goes, until they’re half of something.
I’d always believed I was a work in progress. It’s a belief handed to nearly all of us — that we’re close but not there, fine but improvable, that with a little more effort we’ll finally be enough. And most of it you can chip at yourself, quietly, all the time. You soften the opinion before it leaves your mouth. You laugh at the thing that wasn’t funny. You say you don’t mind either way when you really do. You reply “no worries” to the message that cost you something. You take up a little less room, and you call it being easy to get along with.
I called it that for years. The small things, the ones that cost almost nothing. But it never stopped at the small things. I made myself smaller to be kept. I got quieter in the places I used to be loud. I learned my own edges from the way people flinched at them, and then I filed them down. I gave the boundaries away one by one, because a boundary is only a place where you end, and they might not have liked where that was. That one I still called love. I didn’t have another word for what I was doing.
And it was always the best parts that went first. Not the flaws — you’d think it would be the flaws. It was the particular things, the ones that made me me. The opinion that didn’t match the table. The laugh that was too loud for the room. The enthusiasm someone once called a lot. Those are the first things you shave off to fit, and they are the exact things that were worth keeping. I gave away the best of myself to be chosen, and never once noticed that the best of myself was the thing worth choosing.
I gave away the best of myself to be chosen, and never noticed the best of myself was the thing worth choosing.
I’d had the maths backwards the entire time. I wasn’t half of anything. I walked in whole and spent the whole of it proving otherwise, paying myself out in instalments to buy back a wholeness I’d arrived with.
He wasn’t the first. He was a pattern arriving on schedule.
A red flag was never a verdict. It was information. And I took each piece of it and turned it quietly into a task for later, a thing to fix or wait out or earn my way past. I didn’t ignore the warnings. I renovated them. The same way I’d always renovated everything. The same way I’d renovated me — for years, for everyone, long before he ever walked in.
The flag was red. I painted it the same colour every time — the fear of finding out I didn’t add up to a whole life on my own.