Some men give advice to anyone willing to listen. Other men will lecture you. But there is a rarer figure that literature has always understood better than life tends to admit: the mentor who does not go looking, who is simply found. The student appears without announcement, the relationship begins without ceremony, and what passes between them leaves a mark that neither fully understands until much later.
This form of encounter has produced some of the most enduring stories in the literary tradition. The philosophical mentor, the spiritual guide, the keeper of a craft or a discipline. Each leaves something behind that cannot be measured in practical terms. Hermann Hesse understood this. So did Castaneda, in his own strange and contested way. The mentor-student dynamic is not a narrative device. It is one of the oldest structures of human experience, and fiction keeps returning to it because life keeps producing it.
I think about my own story with some distance now, which is the only way to think about it honestly. As a child in Saltillo, I was certain of my superiority in most things, and life corrected me with remarkable consistency. Races I expected to win. Drawing contests, I assumed, were already mine. A karate exam I did not finish. A chess match was lost. And then mathematics, which arrived like a wall sometime around 1985 and stayed there for thirty years, a quiet and absolute barrier that I could not name and did not understand.
What I know now is that explanations diminish the experience. Offering a clear account of why things unfold the way they do is a kind of theft from the reader, and from the story itself. The mystery is the thing. The invisible line drawn across certain endeavors, the sense that some passage is simply closed to you until it isn't, belongs to a category of experience that resists analysis. Fiction handles it better than autobiography, which is perhaps why I write fiction.
The stories in The Back of a Mirror live in that same territory. People who encounter something they cannot explain must decide whether to name it. The explanations never come. The experiences do. That, as far as I can tell, is also how a life works.