He sits on the terrasse of a cafe, pondering what it would be like for him to become a writer. Henry Miller once thought about the same thing in Paris, but soon he stopped thinking about it because he became one. He was not Henry Miller (and would never be) and not a writer (yet) and not in Paris (yet). To be fair, he wrote about himself and his life and friends when he was younger, but then he stopped when it all became too much for him to put down on paper. At that time he realised that all he had written was fake. Not that the events were unreal, but that the sentiments and emotions he conveyed through them were forced. Exaggerated. Contorted. He realised this because he now understood that if the events he wrote did channel the sentiments as intense as he lavished them on paper he couldn’t have written them down at all. He decided that from then on he should instead write about absolutely sincere sentiments channelled by absolutely concocted events. That’s how it should be done. The realisation dawned upon him in early summer when the blossoms tumbled to the ground and people all became gaily and he became upset because everyone around him was all too gaily. Since then he hasn’t written a word and now it’s already deep into autumn and the air has turned crisp and the leaves are tumbling to the ground. He feels cold but then thinks, clumsily imitating Hemingway, that coldness is good discipline and keeps his mind clear and fresh and crisp just like the autumn air. Is the autumn also called the fall because in autumn everything is falling, first the leaves, then the rain? He thinks he should write the thought down but can’t quite dwell and expand on it. So he gives it up and turns his gaze once more back onto the square in front of him, the square that he has been scrutinising almost every day since early summer, trying to find an object, a person, to which he could safely attach his overflowing sentiments – safely, that is, without leaving himself exposed and vulnerable. Now he knows that there has been at least 2046 leaves fallen from the tree with a huge canopy at the centre of the square, that the vendor of the vegetable stall next to the tree has to get up 4am every morning and drive here and set up the stall and drive back at 4pm with half of the vegetable unsold, that an old lady walks to the stall everyday between 10 and 11am and walks away with a full bag of potatoes, celeries, and onions, that on sunny days her shadow becomes shorter and shorter as it goes deeper and deeper into autumn, and that on the day of autumn equinox the tip of her shadow pointed precisely to the gelateria that children would rush to everyday after school. And yet he still doesn’t know what to write about. His flat white is getting cold and his cigarettes are running out and he still doesn’t know what to write about. He reminds himself about the cooking video he just watched: if only he could take everything on his retina and drop it in a food processor and blend it into a thick, uniform, smooth paste and write about that paste. Only then would everything become unrecognisable and would he be safe. He may even become a great writer because as far as he is concerned nobody has written about that paste before. He dreams on about his prospect of greatness, sublimity, immortality; he dreams that, instead of writing about people around him, he would give birth to characters in a story and then go around the world to seek them, and befriend them, and probably make love to them, before he could start another work and give birth to other characters and repeat the same process over again. Just then he is reminded that the cafe is closing in five minutes. He stands up and packs his empty notebook and immediately gets nostalgic about his as-yet unachieved greatness.