I need to tell you something embarrassing about myself. I'm forty-one years old, I have a master's degree in library science, and I have spent the better part of the last decade trying to beat a video game that was released when I was in high school. It's an old role-playing game, the kind with turn-based combat and pixelated graphics and a story that takes about eighty hours to complete if you don't do any of the side quests. I've done all the side quests. I've done them multiple times. I have memorized the dialogue. I know where every hidden treasure is buried. And yet, I keep playing it. Year after year. Run after run. My ex-wife used to call it my "digital security blanket." She wasn't wrong. When the world feels loud and scary and full of demands I can't meet, I retreat into that game. It's predictable. It's comforting. It's mine.
The divorce was finalized last spring. It wasn't dramatic. No cheating, no fights over custody of the dog. We just woke up one day and realized we had become roommates who occasionally argued about whose turn it was to clean the bathroom. She moved to Portland. I stayed in the house, a small bungalow with a leaky roof and a backyard that was mostly dandelions. I threw myself into my work at the public library, which was rewarding but exhausting. People are weird. They return books with mysterious stains. They ask for help printing things from their phones and then get angry when the printer doesn't work instantly. By the time I got home every night, I didn't have the energy for human interaction. I had just enough energy to microwave a frozen dinner, sit on the couch, and fire up my old game.
That's where I was on a Friday night in September. Frozen lasagna. A glass of cheap red wine. My character, a level seventy-two elven mage named Gregor, standing in front of a dungeon entrance I had cleared at least thirty times before. I was bored. I didn't want to admit it, but I was bored. The game that had carried me through a decade of anxiety and uncertainty had finally lost its magic. The pixels looked tired. The dialogue sounded like a script I had recited in my sleep. I needed something new, but I didn't have the bandwidth for something new. New games require learning. Learning requires effort. Effort requires energy I didn't have.
I closed the game. I opened my phone. I started scrolling. That's how it always starts, isn't it? Just scrolling. Just looking for a tiny hit of dopamine, something to distract me from the heaviness of being alone in a house that felt too big for one person. I saw an ad for a mobile casino. The graphics looked like a bad cartoon, but something about it caught my eye. Maybe it was the colors. Maybe it was the promise of a "welcome bonus." Maybe I was just lonely and desperate and willing to try anything that didn't involve another conversation about due dates and overdue fines.
I downloaded the vavada app on a whim. The installation took about thirty seconds. I sat on my couch, wine in one hand, phone in the other, watching the loading screen spin. I expected pop-ups. I expected intrusive ads. I expected the whole thing to feel cheap and predatory. But it didn't. The interface was clean. Simple. Almost elegant. I created an account. I deposited twenty dollars, which felt like a reasonable amount to lose on a Friday night experiment. The app gave me a tour of the different games. Slots. Table games. Live dealers. I ignored most of it. I'm a creature of habit. I found the simplest slot in the library—three reels, one payline, fruit symbols—and I started spinning.
The first hour was hypnotic. The reels spun. The cherries lined up. The bells rang. I won a few dollars. I lost a few dollars. The net result was basically zero, but the experience was oddly soothing. It was like watching a campfire. The flames moved, the sparks flew, but the pattern was always the same. I didn't have to think. I didn't have to strategize. I just had to click a button and watch the pretty colors. By the time I finished my second glass of wine, I had lost three dollars total. I closed the app and went to bed.
I played again the next night. And the next. And the next. It became my new ritual. Frozen dinner. Cheap wine. vavada app on my phone. Twenty dollars a night, never more. Some nights I lost it all in ten minutes. Those nights, I shrugged, closed the app, and read a book. Other nights, I played for an hour or two, grinding out small wins, walking away with twenty-five or thirty dollars. It wasn't about the money. It was about the rhythm. The predictability. The way the spinning reels quieted the voice in my head that kept asking questions I couldn't answer. Are you going to be alone forever? Should you sell the house? When was the last time you called your mother?
I didn't tell anyone about it. Not my coworkers. Not my sister, who calls every Sunday to check on me. Not my therapist, who I see twice a month and mostly talk about my childhood. The casino was my secret. My dirty little secret. I felt a little ashamed, honestly. I'm a librarian. I'm supposed to be responsible. I'm supposed to set a good example. I'm not supposed to be the guy who sits alone in the dark playing slots on his phone.
But here's the thing. I wasn't hurting anyone. I wasn't spending money I didn't have. My bills were paid. My retirement account was funded. The leaky roof was scheduled for repair. I was a functional adult with a functional life and a functional secret that made the lonely nights feel a little less lonely.
The big night happened in November. The time change had just happened, so it was dark by 5 PM. I hated that. The early darkness made me feel like the world was closing in on me. I poured a glass of wine that was larger than usual. I microwaved a burrito that was smaller than usual. I opened the vavada app and saw that I had a notification. A promotion. Something about "Mystery Mondays." I clicked through. The promotion gave me free spins on a new slot called "Dragon's Hoard." I didn't have to deposit anything. Just claim the spins and let them rip.
I shrugged. Free is free. I hit the button. The reels spun. Nothing. The second spin. Nothing. The third spin. A small win. Forty cents. I yawned. The fourth spin. Another small win. Eighty cents. The fifth spin. Three scatter symbols. A bonus round. Fifteen free spins with a 2x multiplier. I leaned back against the couch cushions. The dragon on the screen breathed fire. The reels started turning on their own.
The first few free spins were nothing special. A dollar here. Two dollars there. I wasn't paying close attention. I was thinking about the burrito I had just eaten, wondering if it was going to give me heartburn. Then the sixth free spin hit. The dragon breathed fire again, but this time the fire turned into wild symbols. Five wilds. Six wilds. The screen exploded in gold. The balance jumped. Ten dollars. Twenty dollars. Forty dollars.
I put down my wine glass. I sat up. The free spins kept coming. The feature had a retrigger mechanic, and I hit it. Another ten free spins. Then another five. The dragon was breathing fire constantly now. Wilds were everywhere. The balance hit eighty dollars. Then one hundred and twenty. Then one hundred and eighty. My heart was pounding. I could feel it in my throat, a thick, insistent pulse that made it hard to swallow.
Two hundred dollars. Two hundred and fifty. Three hundred.
The free spins ended. My balance said three hundred and twenty-seven dollars. I stared at the screen. I had deposited nothing. I had used free spins from a promotion I almost ignored. I had won three hundred and twenty-seven dollars while sitting on my couch in my sweatpants, eating a burrito that tasted like cardboard. The universe had a sick sense of humor.
I withdrew three hundred dollars immediately. Left the twenty-seven to play with later. The withdrawal hit my bank account two days later, on a Wednesday. That Wednesday, I had a therapy appointment. I told my therapist about the win. I expected her to be concerned. Instead, she asked me how it made me feel. I told her it made me feel lucky. She asked me if I thought I had a problem. I told her I didn't think so. I told her about my twenty-dollar limit, my nightly ritual, my ability to walk away. She nodded and said, "It sounds like you're using the game to self-soothe. That's not necessarily unhealthy, as long as it doesn't become the only way you know how to self-soothe."
That hit me. Hard. She was right. The casino wasn't the problem. The isolation was the problem. The divorce was the problem. The fear of being alone was the problem. The casino was just a tool. A tool I was using to avoid the real work of rebuilding my life.
I didn't quit playing after that conversation. But I did change how I played. I started capping my sessions at thirty minutes instead of an hour. I started using the time I saved to call my sister, to text an old friend, to sit on my porch and watch the sunset without a screen in my face. I started using the vavada app as a reward instead of an escape. Finish a chapter of a book? Ten minutes of spins. Complete a chore I'd been avoiding? Twenty minutes. I wasn't perfect. Some nights, I still sat on the couch and spun for an hour, lost in the rhythm, avoiding my feelings. But those nights became less frequent. And the wins, when they came, felt less like salvation and more like a pleasant surprise.
The best surprise came in January. The holidays were over. The house felt empty. I had been good about my limits, disciplined about my time. I opened the vavada app on a Thursday night, just to burn twenty minutes before bed. I had a small balance left over from a previous session—about twelve dollars. I loaded up a game I had never played before, something with pirates and treasure maps. I set my bet to twenty cents. I spun.
I hit the bonus on the third spin. Fifteen free spins with a treasure hunt mechanic. Every time I found a map piece, the multiplier increased. I found three map pieces. Then five. Then seven. The multiplier climbed to 10x. The wins started stacking. Fifty dollars. One hundred. One hundred and fifty. By the time the bonus ended, I had two hundred and eight dollars. Off a twelve-dollar balance. Off a Thursday night when I had almost decided to skip playing entirely.
I withdrew two hundred dollars. I used that money to buy a new bookshelf. Not a fancy one, just a sturdy one from a big box store. I assembled it myself on a Saturday afternoon, lying on my living room floor with an Allen wrench and a growing appreciation for people who do this for a living. When I was done, I put my books on the shelves. My old favorites. The ones I had read a dozen times. They looked good there. They looked like they belonged.
Sometimes I wonder if I would have bought that bookshelf without the win. Probably not. I would have told myself I didn't need it, that the piles of books on the floor were fine, that spending money on furniture was frivolous. But the win gave me permission. Permission to buy something unnecessary. Permission to make my space feel like mine. Permission to stop punishing myself for being alone.
I still play. A few times a week. Twenty dollars here, thirty dollars there. I still lose more than I win, because that's how the math works. But I don't play to win anymore. I play because it's a game. A simple, silly, colorful game that helps me turn off my brain when my brain needs turning off. And sometimes, on the best nights, I win just enough to buy something small. Something that makes my life a little brighter. A new plant for the windowsill. A fancy coffee from the shop down the street. A bookshelf for the books I love.
The ex-wife doesn't know. The sister doesn't know. The therapist knows, but she doesn't judge. She says the goal isn't to eliminate every coping mechanism. The goal is to have enough of them so that no single one becomes a crutch. I think she's right. I think the casino is a tool in a toolbox. Not the biggest tool. Not the most important. But a tool, nonetheless. And on the nights when the house is quiet and the darkness comes early and the loneliness presses against the windows like a fog, I'm glad I have it. I'm glad I have something that reminds me that luck exists. That surprises are possible. That even a guy on a couch with a burrito and a phone can catch a wave and ride it somewhere new.
Even if that somewhere is just a bookshelf. Even if that somewhere is just the next room.