As a child, in school, when the teacher told us to write a 300-word essay, most of my classmates would roll their eyes and scream. I, on the other hand, liked it, and I always needed more space, more words, like someone who runs out of ammunition in the trench or without thread on the spinning wheel, to tell whatever he was telling. While my myopic glasses kissed the sheet of paper, the others looked out the window, waiting for the Muse to appear redeemingly to free them from that tiring duty. Between those crooked lines of still wavering calligraphy, my summer in Galicia, no matter how dull it had been, became, due to the force of the ink from those fountain pens, artifacts of improvised explosion, much more colorful than that of the richest child in class on their Antipodean cruise. I always enjoyed writing, because I always won there, and because we like things that we do with ease. Difficulty makes us uncomfortable. Therefore, when a year ago I was presented with the opportunity to collaborate with this newspaper, I was aware that a dream was coming true, and, although it may sound pretentious, that, in some way, justice was being done, that blind and invisible goddess who, always with diva-like delay, guides our designs along the same path as our desires. Life and writing, which may be the same thing, are nothing more than a long process of reconciliation with oneself, an exercise in therapeutic exhibitionism, in which the writer he undresses in front of the reader, in the hope that he will leave the book or newspaper face down on his bedside table and run to look in a full-length mirror to compare his scars with those of the clerk, and perhaps thus feel, in that smile of the spirit that reading gives, recipient of a personal message; less alone, more understood and again part of that genre that we want to call “human”. As the years go by, faith in surprise disappears, Onetti said. That’s why, aware of that inexorable extinction, he never stopped reading while lying on his bed, blowing the embers of that waning but not willful fire, because his life depended on it. Because when one reads, and when one writes, the wonder revives as if by magic, a spark that jumps, without warning, on the anvil where one is beating the copper of having to tell something worth reading, while hammering the keys in front of a screen that is the reflection of your psyche. Writing is going from mystery to miracle, in the certainty that, with perseverance and the right alloy, that alchemy will end up taking place. There is in writing, as in photography, that “decisive instant” that Cartier-Bresson spoke of, a perfect geometry of words that leaves one as exhausted as it is ecstatic. Writing is photographing, but it is also trying to put a score to the stridency of the daily son, that death-metal which consists of confusing life with movement, transforming, with the floral games of language, the raw noise of the days into a catchy melody that accompanies us until the night. The demands of this priesthood are great, and many enemies are always lurking: our own, such as ego, indolence and self-censorship, or others, daughters of the capricious and sovereign thumb of the reader, such as criticism, or, worse still, indifference. Until, in that ritornello incessant of deaths and small lives, we are reborn in the next article or the next bookwhen that implacable king who yesterday was an executioner and dropped his silent guillotine on our heads, today decides to be a midwife, helping us get her out so we can breathe and continue writing.