Luis Campos

I learned to read as a child, just before starting school. My world opened up to the fantastic expeditions of Jules Verne, the indomitable audacity of Emilio Salgari's pirates, and the intricate mysteries designed by Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The cost of this self-taught immersion was high: my vocabulary was limited, and it would take me days to finish a single volume, as every page required a pause to consult the dictionary. However, the advantage was a blessing: at that age, I didn't distinguish between a novel and a biography. I read with the childlike illusion and imagination that Captain Nemo had genuinely sailed the depths and that Sherlock Holmes was a man of flesh and blood.

The awakening came with adolescence, a sudden blow upon discovering that Frodo never existed. Nevertheless, that loss gave way to a much deeper revelation: a metamorphosis in my approach to literature. I stopped looking for facts and started looking for mirrors. Reading acquired a new meaning when, upon confronting the pages, I found traits and conflicts in certain characters that I identified with, and fiction became a powerful tool for self-awareness.

As the years passed, that reading consciousness transformed into a cumulative urge. I gathered stories, sketches, and fragments, many of them unfinished, until an unexpected turn of events reminded me of Catherine Earnshaw's phrase in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights:

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

It was then that I understood my need, more than my desire, to share my writings. My motivation does not reside in ego or recognition, but in the simple and profound reason that, perhaps, there is a soul in the world that identifies with my words, that finds in them the same meaning that I found in giving them life. It is an act of communion: sharing what is written to find that other self.