Relationship Status: It’s Complicated

“Why do people always think being lovers shouldn’t be complicated?”
― Nora Roberts

Photo by Imani Clovis on Unsplash

Simply Cohabitants

[Enter man]: silence

[Enter woman]: more silence

Eventually — the two give the other a nod and a brief smile that fades into thin air nearly as quickly as it was given. They talk shallowly about work and how their days were, as if something were to be out of the ordinarily boring day that replays itself over and over, day after day, week after week, month after month. Perhaps even year after year? Neither can remember when their love fizzled into nothing more than a glimmer of hope that flees the scene before even that’s attainable. It’s their third year of celebrating their relationship, but they’re basically just roommates at this point — exchanging cordiality and false security of love. Though their warped sense of familiarity and comfort keep them confined in the same house, the same relationship, the same essence of bore replaying itself like a time paradigm gone wrong, they can’t ignore the innate feelings that haunt them as if they’re already dead. Dead like zombies merely going through the motion of a relationship rather than — God forbid — actually partaking in it, despite (or maybe, in spite of?) the grounds of which to love and play and roam freely and happily and wistfully like a…