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Blinded by Love (Short Story)

She was young and smart and by no traditional beauty standards a pretty young thing. She had an air of charm and her charismatic personality was her make up. How did she end up falling in love with the most arrogant, bratty man from her apartment is unknown to anyone who knows her well. It was probably the peer pressure to have a boyfriend. Even her best friend was always busy talking about her string of relationships and seemed to have forgotten Amrita completely until her next breakup.
Amrita had no excuse for falling into an abusive relationship. She was smart and she was the one who would warn others not to date jerks.

Her first red flag came up when she was trying to talk to him about a stalker who was making her life miserable. He acted like he was not even remotely interested in the topic, while she was sobbing, seeking his support and advise. She learned to handle the stalker with her parents' support. The next red flag came up when she took him out with a couple of friends for lunch one afternoon. They were casually chatting, he verbally shot her down in the middle of their conversation over a fact that she had not gotten correctly. Her face shrunk immediately and he did not notice or apologize to her later that day. He thought it was perfectly okay to be rude to her in public. He continued to humiliate her. He would constantly talk about how lucky she was to have him in her life and she was ungrateful to him. She only felt he was stating the facts and she agreed with what he said. She felt she was lucky. She was actually miserable. So the day when he broke up with her over text, she was in denial. Amrita ran back to him and cried and felt that she convinced him not to break up. He had already moved on. She clung on to him for dear life. Living within the same apartment complex does not help the cause. She was silently pinning for him while he was with someone else. She saw them together every single day for the next few weeks. Such was the state of her denial that even then she did not understand that he had moved on. After months and years of crying herself to sleep, she had still not moved on. She chose to move away from India on a foreign assignment and stay there for as long as she could.

She managed to save enough to buy herself a new home there. Her parents also moved in with her. She has a car that she would never had dreamed of owning back in India. She lives comfortably. She has the most beautiful lawn, adorned with fresh flowers, which her father religiously plucks every morning for offering to God. She has a life everyone envies. She still cries herself to sleep every day. She does not realize she was in an abusive relationship. She is blinded by love. 

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