I can feel your muscles as I watch them contract beyond possibility because I am doing the same. Our respective forces are concentrated where they have been so often, along two fine edges each honed to a hair's breadth.
There is nothing that matters more than the sliver of steel where our opposing power is balanced, and we stare – I at you, you at me – and see strength shamelessly bared.
This exact moment, the culminating lock, before your feet come into play or a voice or a memory, is perfect and ours alone. We cannot share such a match as this, for we can find none. The pressure grinds infinitely into itself and the heartbeats sustaining it pulse through our hands joined in combat.
I feel each throb that pulsates along your throat because you feel each that beats along mine.
As willing to win as to die, as eager to defeat as to fail, for (we know) you cannot give so much and hopes too. There is only the body and the blade, all else is fatal and will take no blood.
From the poles, your corner and mine, we have lived to this day to find these truths. We thrust them here, where they've been so often, only to see they match under all that makes you separate from all that makes me me.
And this is perfect.
When the tension gives, the world returns and we peel apart, a dim imprint remaining of the other.
We hate to see them on each other's fronts, wishing we belonged back out of time where nothing but the point where metal holds metal has form and meaning.
You will give this all to me and no one else, you are my own entire. As I am yours.
If there were words, we would not fight.
And so we draw.