As a child, sharks occupied a disproportionate space in my mind. The great white appeared as something absolute, reduced in my imagination to its most unsettling features — the dark, unblinking eyes, the pale body, the teeth arranged with mechanical precision. I encountered Jaws too early. I watched the films repeatedly, not with excitement, but with a persistent mixture of fascination and dread. My father encouraged the fixation, bringing home books, films, documentaries on VHS. I absorbed them without resistance. The fear gradually detached itself from the screen. It entered ordinary situations. The bathtub. The swimming pool. The sea. The surface of the water no longer felt neutral. It suggested concealment. Yet water was never avoided. On the contrary, it remained the environment I preferred. Even then, the contradiction required no resolution. Fear and attraction coexisted without difficulty. This pool defined much of my childhood. It was where I learned to swim, where hesitation first became perceptible. I rarely remained alone for long, though I was persistently drawn underwater, toward the quiet suspension beneath the surface. Looking at it now, the earlier fear appears altered in character. The intensity has diminished. What remains is something more abstract. The animal itself has receded, leaving behind an idea constructed from memory, images, repetition. Certain distances, however, remain conditional. A shark is a shark is a shark.