Your writing is too abstract, said every newspaper.

Too philosophical, too sensational, too emotional. Just too.

I argue with a British penman about the difference between a journalist and a writer.

“You must be more relatable,” he echoes the newspapers.

“Why?” I respond coldly to his commonness.

“To be read, of course.”

“I don’t want just to be read.”

He pauses. I take the opportunity to rant:

“Don’t you see? A writer can’t be of the world because they read about that world everyday just by living in it. We have to create different worlds. We can’t think the way our readers do. What’s the point in their reading from their own perspective? Memory at best, no?”

He looks up at me through his bushy eyebrows.

“You’re going to die alone, you know?”

“I know.”

He was a tourist.