<center>Antoine</center>

I don't know where to begin. No one wants to interview a dead person. No one wants to touch a dead person. Of course, we're all dying. It's just that no one knows it yet. That's the best part of life when you're fucking invincible and snorting lines off the sweating back of a rentboy with crystal dick. I look around me now and think, What a waste. What a shameful waste. Of course, I'm not interested in any eleventh hour redemptions. That's just desperate and even more sad than being forgotten as someone once met at a party. It all started with the sweats and headaches. At first, I thought I was getting old. I lamented beneath my sunglasses at clubs and pretended that I was reviving some old trend. I was too old for the sunglasses and opted to suffer through the stabbing ice pick pain that the bright lights would give me the next morning. The sweats were more troublesome. They would spark when I last expected them to. I would leave the lecture hall, shaking in my suit and completely soaked. I keep an extra suit in my office now. What a waste, what a shameful waste.

When I die, I'll be shoved into a cardboard box and tossed into the flames. I'll turn into a fine silt with flecks of bone and tooth. I'll be shipped home to my mother in France. I haven't figured out how to tell her that something's gone terribly wrong. Each morning, I stare into the mirror and say, I love you very much and I want you to know that I'm dying. I'm sorry. I'm afraid. Then, I sigh and continue to shave off the rest of my face.

The doctor told me three months. I've lived for four and now I'm not sure what will happen next. We're cautiously optimistic, as its called in the medical profession. I've refused treatment. Chemotherapy will waste me away. Radiation will burn me. I might as well live.

-- Antoine Brouchard.