Part III: All Hallow's Eve
It was one of those nights when we were invincible; youth was immortal and anyone over the age of twenty-one could go fuck themselves. It was, in a word, everything that one's eighteenth Halloween should be.
The power went off about 8:30, plunging the entire campus of my small college into darkness. The wind bucked and howled and thrashed the trees like nothing I had ever seen-and after living for so long in the windiest spot in the States, I was no stranger to the wind.
After sitting for a while in the darkness that seemed strangely apropos, the object of my affliction, James, turned to me with a heathen smile. "I've gotta go enjoy this wind." That was all I needed to hear. We flew up the stairs like the wind itself, and each grabbed our respective trenchcoats-mine a pewter-colored vinyl, his, black leather. Then we slipped into the night, and it began.
He laughed harshly and shouted into the sky, taunts tossed to a God he refused to formally believe in, egging Him on. "What you got, God?" His voice bellowed loud enough for me to hear it over the screaming wind. "All you're doing is making me look good."
And James did, indeed; he looked invincible, the wind keening around us as his trenchcoat billowed black into a night devoid of any light save the celestial... and the spark in James' eye. I knew at this moment there was more to his beliefs than the atheism he had informed me of one night a few months ago, the night I told him of my love for God.
"I'll be around longer than you will, God! I have everything!" He laughed, nearly giddy as a child. He was youth incarnate: a carpe-diem Adonis mouthing the words that have come for centuries, whether whispered in the back of young minds or screamed into the blackest wind. "I have YOUTH! I have LOOKS! What you got, God? You show me one thing tonight that impresses me, and I'll go pray for ya."
I prayed. God didn't show him... But He showed me things I'll never forget.. Things about myself, whispered into a wind so strong that none could stand in it but we two.
I am an extremely devout Christian, but even a fact such as that seemed irrelevant with my trenchcoat flapping and the dirt stinging my eyes, with my sacrilegious beloved next to me, shouting lines from Invictus, as if calling in a cosmic poker hand. After all, I, too, was young. It was so easy to forget at times.. But at other times, so easy to remember.
"It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishment the scroll:" His pale index finger thrust into the sky as he emphasized certain words. I'd never heard his voice so loud and ferocious, never heard such a determined tone. He emphasized each syllable violently and with the utmost care, as if he wanted to make sure that any who listened understood exactly what he meant. "I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul."