Some other place, somewhere, some other time - a tentative start to a novel that may be renamed later

It must have been so. There, then he might have been a man and treated her cruelly while here, now it is just the opposite. He is still a man but being treated cruelly by her, a woman. This makes it symmetrical, aesthetic, if nothing else and hence, in that way, a matter of satisfaction. This does not lead to any kind of satisfaction, however, such a thought. What matters is not to be treated with cruelty and not treating someone cruelly.  Of course, there are no other lives or planets or universes, it is here itself that they have both been one thing or the other to each other. The blame is equally distributed or apportioned as is the praise. It is only in such encounters that one finds out how much of the worst and the best one can have brought out in one and bring out in the other. Looking at it in that sense such encounters are truly significant as harbingers of self-knowledge, if not worth having or beneficial. Maybe they are that too. Maybe in the long run, they turn entirely poisonous or malignant or entirely benign, like cancer cells, if such a thing is possible.