The Chore Formerly Known As Love

Love doesn’t die.

It decays.

Quietly.

Like fruit in the fridge

you swore you’d eat,

but left to rot

because looking at it meant admitting

you've lost your appetite for it.

You say you’re in love.

Cute.

Is it the kind where you whisper I love you

to avoid saying I’m tired of conversations inevitably turning into fights

Is it passion, 

the raw, uninhibited bestiality crawling beneath the skin, 

or just the fear of being alone in your loneliness

dressed up as companionship?

Does your love still arrive

without needing to be invited?

Or is it punctual now —

like a chore,

like taxes,

like scheduled sex you both agreed to

out of habit, not hunger?

Be honest —

When was the last time you kissed them

without needing it to mean something, anything?

When was the last time

your silence wasn’t a negotiation?

When was the last time

you reached for their hand to lose yourself and watch time freeze

without first checking your phone?

They say love takes work.

Sure.

But this feels more like

an unpaid internship in emotional endurance.

This isn’t work.

This is maintenance.

This is repainting cracks

instead of admitting the foundation’s fucked.

You lie to each other in kindness now.

You feel the urge to call your fights, conversations.

Your sex is pretend-poetry: no art, all dramatics.

Your jokes come with disclaimers

because love makes your skin brittle

as if your beings have been failed by your feelings.

And yet —

you stay.

Not out of love.

Out of legacy.

Out of sunk cost.

Out of the fear that maybe, just maybe,

this is as good as it gets.

You wear each other like undies —

wrinkled, faded,

too familiar to discard,

too hollow to defend.

So I ask:

Is this love?

Or is it two people

too tired to start over,

too scared to be alone,

too conditioned to clap for the corpse

just because it’s dressed in wedding rings?

What if your idea of love

is just your fear of dying alone

wearing perfume and polite laughter?

What if the only reason you’re still here

is because leaving would mean

admitting you stayed too long?

You talk about growing together.

But what if you’ve just been

wilting in sync?

What if love stopped being oxygen

and became routine inhalation

out of guilt,

out of memory,

out of muscle?

Sometimes —

the bravest kind of love

is the one that ends

before it curdles into resentment,

before it turns your name

into a flavour they can no longer stomach.

And if this poem feels like a question

you don’t want to answer —

that’s not on me.

That’s on the part of you

that still calls it love

just because you’re scared

to call it what it’s become.