John Carter is a writer from Ottawa.

I collect and recycle empty bottles in order to eat. I eat in order to survive.

It is not the form of survival I would have chosen if I were indeed given a choice in the matter. Unfortunately, I was not given a choice. I must remain invisible, for when I am seen I become hunted. Again, if I were given the choice, it would not be this way. It is this way however, because I am apart from the world, I am apart from the incubator. I have not been fooled, and because of this something out there hunts me.

I suspect my hunter is the maker and breaker of worlds. It is birth and it is death. It shows neither compassion nor does it show mercy. It is the only true evil. There are no evil men or women, only my hunter, which commits evil through the innocent. This I know because I have seen what it is, and I have seen the innocent it has kidnapped from a time forgotten.

I am on a journey of escape, a journey back to the time forgotten. It began when I decided to journey from my village into the lands beyond. Little did I know at the time that my journey into was really a journey from. I couldn’t have realized I wasn’t heading towards anything. That I was really escaping. But such is the way of the world. Most of us only realize something when it is too late to do anything about it, though I suppose we can try and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

I journey to escape my hunter and his hunting ground once and for all. I have endured much suffering on my travels but I was once told that in order to escape one must be able to endure the most horrendous burdens. The way is plagued with pit traps of all kinds and the most dangerous of all are the acts of my fellow human beings, whose acts do not belong to them, but are actually the acts of the hunter.

My fellow human beings for the most part act unaware of the puppeteer who pulls their strings. The hunter acts through a most ingenius strategy of trickery. It fools human beings into thinking their thoughts are really their own, and in turn the thoughts produce actions which act out its will. What the hunter does not know however, is it can never catch me. What the hunter does not know is that it can never stop the free. One day I will escape from this prison, and I will escape this wicked lie.