He offered a deluge of words, more often than not in a formal context, sharply pointed. There was little room for arguing with him, though it did not stop me from finding the little nitches in which I could niggle my way in.

We would argue for hours upon hours, you know. Hurtful pleasures, paid out in lacerations across the soul, subliminally mapping out our ideas and the future roads we would take for them.

Everyone needs a personal demon, he said, one good great love who also becomes the greatest enemy of all time. There was no pleasure in having an enemy you did not know so well. You had to fall in love with them a little to get any satisfaction at all in hating them.

I would simply look at him, adding memories to each column inside, wondering which one he fit into at the time, my love or my enemy. They seemed pretty level mostly.

Of course, there is always that unforgivable line. The one you never hope they cross. But he was born to cross lines and I was born to take him to task for it. Tough love, he called it. He groomed me for it. He lay waste all my ideals. He made me build my foundation all alone, without help. I had to think up every careful stone that held up the idea of who I was. And then he would corner me in a great siege.

Let me raze your castle. And a great battle would take place.

It was bloody beautiful.

Don’t be too hasty in professing your love for me, he would say suddenly in the dark of night. I would raise my lips from his sweating skin and smile without missing a beat. Oh I’ll always love you, I said to him. Even if I wanted to rip him to shreds deep down. But, you know, he probably wanted to do the same thing to me somewhere deep inside. Even when I wanted him to win at times and consume me, until the fire inside was gone, and I lay looking through dead dull eyes wondering why I still had a soul when things that hurt that much should kill it as well.

It was a personal purgatory, the days we spent together. And it was a testament to something much deeper, harsher for both its nakedness and not so easy appearance. It was a conflagration of two souls meant to be one. There is no love without a great battle and surrender.

But for all that there was love, there was so much more. Those unforgettable lines never fade a day for their age. I wonder if, when marble cracks, the lines bleed through to the bottom.

How long can you really love me, he would tease. As long as it takes, I thought, until every pleasurable experience in life is an evaluation of the one you love. I can liken standing before a great thunderstorm, with the hair raised on my arms, to his breath on the back of my neck. It becomes the great tug of war over the soul.

Does it belong to you or me? Did it ever belong?