The Sunsets I Miss, the Red Flags I Remember

There are nights I ache for the sunsets at that house. The way the sky turned molten gold, the way it felt like mine. I miss having my house. My space. My stability. And I’ll admit — I miss the man I once shared it with.

That’s the pull of nostalgia: it shows you only the good. The laughter in the kitchen. The warmth of familiar arms. The photo that arrives on your phone two years later and slices you wide open.

But science — and truth — have a way of breaking the spell. My therapist told me the average person goes back to a broken relationship seven times. Seven. Not because it’s right, but because it’s familiar. Because the ache of missing the good can be louder than the memory of the bad.

And yet — the red flags don’t change with time. They were there then. They are there now. They are the same storms that stripped me down, no matter how brightly nostalgia tries to paint the sky.

I heard something on a podcast that stopped me cold. The host said: sometimes women stray, not because they are faithless, but because they’ve been watching their partner kill themselves little by little — with addiction, denial, destruction — and they finally reach for something that feels alive. It’s not betrayal of him. It’s a desperate attempt to keep herself breathing.

That was a rude awakening. And yet, it rang true.

Because here’s the part that stings the most: I’ve been there too.

I know what it feels like to reach for something more “alive” while staying silent about the truth. To crave oxygen so badly that you take it wherever you can find it, even when you know it will torch the fragile scaffolding of what you’ve built. Deep down, I knew speaking the truth would destroy everything. So I didn’t.

And yet — here we are. The silence, the reaching, the breaking. It all came to light anyway.

Because here’s the truth: I didn’t walk away from sunsets. I walked away from storms. I didn’t leave a house. I left a place that had stopped being a home.

Tonight, I sit in a borrowed space. I am grateful for shelter, but I feel the ache of not having “mine.” Sometimes it feels like failure. Like being rootless. Like being “homeless.”

But here’s the reframe I am clinging to: I am not homeless. I am housed while rebuilding. This is not failure — it’s foundation. Every strong structure begins as rubble. Every wild woman begins with a breaking.

Because I know this truth better than most: when a roof is rotten, no patch will save it. You can tarp it. You can throw on shingles. You can smile at the surface. But storms don’t lie. They’ll rip it back open and expose what’s underneath.

That house, that relationship — it wasn’t sound. The rot had spread too deep. And as much as I wanted to cling to the good, the sunsets, the feeling of “mine”… the structure couldn’t hold.

So I’m not failing. I’m rebuilding. And just like a roof, rebuilding doesn’t start with something shiny on top. It starts with tearing back, ripping out, and facing the ugly truth beneath. Only then can something solid and lasting be built.

So if you’re reading this and you’re standing in the in-between — missing the good but haunted by the red flags — let me place you in front of your higher self for just a moment:

👉 You are not called to go back. 

👉 You are not called to keep breathing in secondhand smoke from someone else’s destruction.

👉 You are called to grow forward.

The sunsets ahead will be mine again. Not because I went back. But because I kept walking forward.