A replacement for a broken heart.

One day I woke up half-naked on the bed in Australia's biggest city; Sydney. The heat in the air grew heavier and heavier by the minute. Depressed and uncomfortable. I stared towards the ceiling and watched the fan spin clockwise as it made a steady humming sound. I was lost, confused, and heartbroken as the love of my life had called off our engagement; she had secretly fallen in love with someone else from her hometown. Our five years together had been thrown down the drain. "Merci et Au revoir," she said to me without any emotions before returning to the south of France. The scene when she had walked out of my life continued to replay over and over in my head; my feet were frozen to the ground as she wheeled her big brown suitcase towards the door, opened it, and turned her body away from me without looking back, carefully closed the door behind her. Just like that, she was gone. I eventually got out of the bed and dawdled my way to the kitchen in my underwear to grab a beer solely to drown my sorrow; there is always happiness at the end of the bottle.

There were sixteen missed calls from my employer and a threatening message about my position at the workplace as I had given him no explanation for my absence of twelve days. He was a person who would have shown no sympathy for an employee who had lost his purpose in life nor a loved one. There was no reason to explain to a manager who kept himself in a tiny office, sitting in a fat cozy comfortable chair, punching two index fingers into the keyboard furiously for ten hours a day. I had no plans to return to my dead-end job regardless. I inhaled a deep lungful of smoke from my cigarette and exhaled it with a steady rhythmic flow, smoke billowing from my nostrils. I plunked the empty brown beer bottle on the kitchen table and said "I am off to the pub" out loud into the thick hot air.

The two arrows had struck twelve o’clock on the dot and there were some similar faces at local at the watering hole; quiet, motionless, and waiting for death to come. I ordered my beer at the bar, took in a good mouthful before I had made my way to the gaming room. When I entered the room, there was an old lady playing a fruit machine and we made eye contact with a wide smile. I scouted around the room and found the dragon slot machine. I inserted one hundred dollars and it was vaporized in a matter of minutes. A hint of hope had encouraged me to insert more money into the slot machine and lowered my bets from five dollars to three per spin. At twenty dollars and thirty-six cents, there was a ching-a-ling sound; a random feature spin. My pulse peaked with an adrenaline rush. I selected the black dragon; fifteen free multiple spins. The reels spun freely and I ordered another beer without taking my eyes off the screen when the waitress came around but luck had failed me after it was finished. "That was a terrible feature," I said very disappointedly to the waitress as she stood beside me with the pint on the tray. She smiled without a word and walked away.

After four hundred dollars was feed into the sucker to no avail, I forced myself to leave and try my luck in a different pub; when a man is absolutely heartbroken and has nothing to lose, has no woman, no job or no direction in life, but to lose it all in one day, so what? Why not? Life itself is a gamble. Never can we know what happens tomorrow or the next day or in five weeks or even two years; he can risk it all.

Numbers never lie and people are too sensitive. I already knew that the machines were designed to give the player a buzz for a short good ride, knowing that, my chances of losing were high but they made me forget about her. The more I continued to play, the less I thought about her. Meanwhile, as I grooved my place into a new chair and played the lightning Panda slot machine, I heard a young attractive girl behind me slamming the triangle button with every effort she had. It was a sound of anger and frustration. Clearly, she was losing her money hard and risking it all she had but no one cared for her well-being. The waitresses made no effort to calm her down. After all, most regular players go to the pub to try to win the jackpot and forget about the world.

In between a fog of cigarette smoke, there was a man with thick glasses in his fifties who sat beside me emptying his wallet to test his luck. "How’s it goin mate? You have had some luck I see" he said loudly for everyone in the room to hear but no-one bothered to turn around to glance at my credit. "Yeah, you know how it is buddy, some days are good and most days are not, just like a relationship," I said sarcastically. He laughed and shared his struggling marriage story. "My misses always complains about how I can afford to spend my time playing the pokies than I do at home. She rags non-stop and yells at me for losing two thousand bucks in a single night. Mate, I rather spend it at the pub than with the miserable cow. We sleep in separate rooms and it's bloody great. Divorce is expensive." He paused for a few second as watched his reel land a good win. "It an't worth it mate, I tell ya." I was speechless and had a feeling that I needed to escape from his negative vibes. There was already enough damage in my life from the French feminine touch. I cashed out my credit and got up from the seat. "Best of luck buddy," I said to him cheerfully and I walked away. "You too mate," he said to my backside.

My eyes were glued onto the new screen as I tried to be relaxed and played with the remaining credits; three hundred dollars. Not a single person sat beside me to distract my comfort zone until my ears picked up, a tune sang by Alicia Keys. It brought back a memory of the first time when I made love to the wicked cold-hearted woman. A single tear drops from my left eye. My stomach started to turn with the reels on the machine. I became very irritated that I could not focus on the screen in front of me as I increased the bets to the maximum limit, "Je m’en fiche d’elle" I said to the screen and hoped it would return the affection in high numbers. Eventually, the fruit machine had taken everything I had by the time the song was finished. I pulled out my wallet from my pocket and looked inside, it was empty. I hit the reserved button and made my way to the ATM. Inserted my bank card and requested a withdrawal. It had denied my request and notified me that I had already withdrawn the daily limit of fifteen hundred dollars. I returned to the machine and poured my fresh pint into my mouth with a swing of my arm. I stumbled my way out of the pub, knowing that tomorrow was another day to try my luck all over again, as long as the slots took my mind away from the emotional pain of someone whom I loved very deeply and that did not love me anymore...

#Lifejourney #Sydney #gambling #Lifeexperience #shortstory