It All Begins Here…

“Who is the hunter and who is the prey?” is hardly a question answered at the start. It is a pursuit—intent sharpened to a point, the illusion of mastery. I move through life as one moves through jungles, believing I am tracking something external: an image, a flash, a configuration of meaning that appears and withdraws. It’s just at the edge of perception, not a memory exactly, but a pressure—one like a touch or caress even—behind thought, heat behind the eyes. I follow it; my patience is a delicious skill. I circle it, again and again, rehearsing the moment of capture, convinced that proximity is proof, that closeness itself confers control. The mind arranges its frames, stretched, clean, and ready, believing the thing pursued will finally be still.

But what I am stalking has already learned my moves. It allows itself to be nearly captured, lets me believe I am the more cunning animal, lets me think endurance matters, that dominance belongs to me. When my hands finally embrace it, what I thought was distance collapses into intimacy, and intimacy becomes consumption. The heat I believed I could hold begins instead to hold me. If I am not devoured suddenly, I am absorbed gradually, dismantled by my own insistence on possession. The image does not fade—it burns, it confronts me. And in that burning, the roles finish rearranging themselves. I recognize, too late, that I have been carried along by hunger, not direction, and that the maw I feared was never ahead of me, but opening from within.

What you don’t know.

Eaten.

Marni Fraser

0104.2026

It all begins here.