Fleeting

Prologue

There are precisely 3 things that every person who met Kasey Braddocks knew about him and these things were as set in stone as the changing of the seasons and the passage of time.

1. He was gayer than the fourth of July.

2. He was - to put it bluntly- a whore.

3. He was dying.

And not gay in the sense of happy, and not dying in the sense that we're all dying, every single one of us, just very very slowly, every hour on the clock bringing us an hour closer to death.

Do you ever think about that? Stare up at the sky and wonder what comes next? Where do you go when you inevitably kick the bucket? Because it is inevitable, and in being inevitable it becomes the one constant of life. Love, happiness, legacy - not a single one guaranteed. But death is constant, and 100% guaranteed. Certainness is almost comforting, don't you think?

You can fuck up your life beyond all reason, make mistake upon mistake upon mistake, abandon your family, drop out college and become a stripper, lose and gain everything in equal measure and then finally lose again, for real this time. But no matter what you do, you still die just like everyone else. You die, and your parents die, and your bitchy neighbours die, and your boss, and the president, and everyone in the history of humankind dies.

It is inevitable.

Doesn't mean it's fair.

Because we don't all get the same amount of time. Sometimes death comes too quick and we're not ready for it. Sometimes death has to tear precious life from our hands as we clutch to it hopelessly, kicking and screaming, I'm not ready! I'm not done! There's still so much to do, so much to say! Sometimes, and as is the case of Kasey Braddocks, it takes us too young.

Because Kasey Braddocks was dying. Dying for real. Dying in the sense that he was 24 and every day he got weaker, sicker and more angry at the world. The doctors gave him a year, maybe two in a best case scenario world.

But this is not a best case scenario world, this is a realistic world.

The year is 1987. For those caught up in the past, it is 1984.

The place is New York City. That much is constant for now.

The AIDS epidemic is in its sixth year.

Time is ticking. You've spent, what...a minute reading this? Thirty seconds? You are thirty seconds closer to death than you were when you opened this book. Think about that, but don't think about it for too long.

We shouldn't waste time. Let us begin.