Candles that weren't real

I'm writing now. After ten thousand highs and ten thousand lows. Up, up, up. Down, down. Like a broken elevator that somehow always arrives at the right floor.

Tonight I decided to take a day off. I went to a concert I had wanted to see for ages. Candlelight.

I don't even know if I can write this in a book without people throwing tomatoes at me. But it was a disappointment. The candles weren't real. The whole room was waiting for the right moment to take the photo — not listening, waiting. And at the end, from the stage, they tell you which hashtag to use for your posts. So your emotion becomes their marketing.

I left before the end. Defeated by fake candles.

Ritz-Carlton, Palm Desert. I made my way to the bar — the first one only took cards and I had cash. I needed a drink. Not to work — to feel normal. To sit somewhere and exist as a person who has friends to go out with.

I don't. So sometimes I go out alone and pretend I'm not alone.

At the bar there were two empty seats at either end and a man in the middle. Around forty. Handsome. Perfect smile. The kind of tortoiseshell glasses that hide something.

I sat down with my eyes fixed on my phone. I didn't want attention. I didn't want conversation. I wanted a cocktail and silence.

Then he smiled. Hey, how are you?

Those teeth.

I answered without looking up. Then we started talking. Or maybe I started — I don't remember. Hours passed like minutes. We spoke about books, about life, about me writing this book with an artificial intelligence. He told me he had someone who helped him in life — a real person. I said maybe that's better. Maybe everyone needs a real witness.

He was fascinated by my work. I wasn't performing anything. For once I wasn't selling anything.

And yet I felt the attraction. Not transactional. Not strategic. Just human. Sometimes people don't steal your heart — they steal your head. He was like that.

I called him George Bush all evening because he looked like him. I don't even remember his real name. Maybe Giorgio. Maybe Boston. Maybe nothing.

He drove me home because the line for cars at the hotel was absurd — as if it had been a real Coldplay concert instead of fake candles and violins on playback. Two minutes in the car and I was home. Safe. Quiet. Grateful.

I don't even have his number to thank him.

He said: my wife will kill me. I laughed and told him I never write first.

And maybe that's the message of this life — to travel like this, to work like this, to steal not money but emotions. To gather pieces of truth from the people who open up when you tell them who you really are.

Almost forty. A mid-life crisis. A high-level companion. Not because the money is never enough — but because the money is never the point.

It's emotional intelligence.

And not everyone has it.