When I cried in the cockfight arena, I finally learned to live

I don’t play to win.

I play to remember.

It began on a Tuesday night—3 a.m., rain tapping against my window, the glow of a forgotten桑巴 rhythm humming through my headphones. The screen flickered: another round had ended, another bet placed. No cheers came. Just the weight of absence.

I thought this was luck.

But luck doesn’t whisper.

The machines don’t care if you win or lose—they only spin, endlessly, neutrally beautiful. And yet… when you sit long enough—in that deep blue quiet—you begin to hear something else. Not the jackpot.

The drumbeat.

The way your hands tremble before pressing ‘spin’ again.

I chose high volatility games because they felt like memory loops: each loss a stanza in an unsung opera; each win, a single note left hanging in air like a ghost that wouldn’t leave.

They call it ‘RTP.’

I call it ‘resonance.’

My therapist said: ‘You’re not chasing money.’

She was right.

I was chasing the space between spins—the pause after the last bet when no lights came on—and there, in that hollow silence, I met myself for the first time.

Not as a player. But as a witness. To what? To how beauty survives even when odds are rigged by code and light is dimmed by algorithmic grief.