Luis Campos

I learned to read as a boy, just before school claimed me. My world cracked open with Jules Verne's fantastic voyages, the reckless daring of Emilio Salgari's pirates, and the tangled mysteries spun by Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

That self-taught immersion came at a price. My vocabulary was thin, and finishing a single book could take days — every page demanding its own detour to the dictionary. But the handicap turned out to be a gift: at that age, I made no distinction between fiction and fact. I read with a child's full faith that Captain Nemo had truly plunged the depths, that Sherlock Holmes breathed and walked among us.

Adolescence brought the reckoning — a quiet blow the day I learned Frodo had never existed. But that small loss opened onto something larger: a shift in how I read altogether. I stopped hunting for facts and started hunting for mirrors. Books took on new weight once I began finding, in certain characters, pieces of myself — their flaws, their conflicts, laid bare on the page. Fiction became a way of knowing myself.

Over the years, that habit of seeing myself in stories turned into something closer to hoarding. I collected tales, sketches, half-finished fragments — until, unexpectedly, I remembered Catherine Earnshaw's words in Wuthering Heights:

"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."

That was when I understood — not a wish, but a need — to share what I had written. It isn't ego driving me, or the hope of recognition. It's something simpler: the chance that somewhere, some stranger might read my words and recognize themselves in them, the way I once recognized myself in the words of others. Writing, shared, becomes a kind of communion — a way of finding that other self out there.