Petunia, his favorite stuffed giraffe from his childhood, its fur long gone; its neck riddled with small holes and bereft of its stuffing. From a small distance, a person seeing him carry it around would have wondered who and why someone gave a small child a dead chicken.

He stroked the patchy fur. If someone were to ask him, it was still his favorite stuffed animal. In decades to come, he would learn about the infinite variety of cliches that rattled around in the vast warehouse of human knowledge, and long after the time when technology morphed these cliches into “memes,” he would find himself with a lump in his throat and a slightly damp cheek each time he heard a reference to _The Velveteen Rabbit_, or the maxim that the worn-out child’s toys were simply bearing the hallmarks of being loved.

Even at that moment — him alone in his small room, still tense from the previous evening, filled with a Gordian knot of emotions that his fourteen-year-old mind labored to understand — he wondered about that idea. The idea that the act of loving someone, or something that became a “someone” by way of a young and perhaps desperately lonely imagination, exacted a price. He held Petunia, trying to remember how her cloth eyelashes, now mostly gone, had felt on his cheek. It bothered him, it didn’t sit right, to think that love took a toll — that you could love even a toy until it was broken, or torn, or leaking its stuffing and bearing no resemblance to the fluffy, cute thing that had delighted him when he had been presented it with a warm smile and a hug.

He held Petunia, her fur-less cloth scratching his cheek. He cried. He cried for a long time.