My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys- T.S. The voices in Grayson’s head had called the rain to end your days of wild. Maybe it was just bad timing, maybe it was fate, but you’ve learned not to count on fate. Fate is too much like him—it shows up when it feels like it, changes the rules halfway through, and leaves you holding a handful of nothing. Rivulets descend your plastic smile as you step into the gala. One of many you attend, one of the many more the Hawthornes throw. The air smells like old money and new perfume, the kind that clings to velvet gowns and hides the scent of exhaustion. You move through the crowd like someone on display—and in a way, you are. People watch you with the same polite interest they’d give a rare vase: beautiful, expensive, probably cracked somewhere they can’t see. “You should’ve seen me when he first got me,” you tell them. The words come out rehearsed, practiced, like you’ve been polishing them for years. You offer the faintest smile, as if the memory of how he used to be is proof that what he is now isn’t your fault. *Like how he used to be will justify how he is now. Your boy only breaks his favorite toys. And you? You’re the queen of the sandcastles he destroys—built with too much care, too much love, just to watch him kick them over. Because it fit too right. Puzzle pieces in the dead of night, snapping into place with that quiet, satisfying click that makes you believe in things like destiny. You should’ve known it was a matter of time. Your boy only breaks his favorite toys. And you had a litany of reasons why you could’ve played for keeps this time. Reasons you recited like scripture, convincing yourself that maybe this time he’d see the worth in keeping something whole. You know you’re just repeating yourself. Put you back on your shelf, but first—pull the string. Make you say the words he likes to hear. Make you move the way he likes to see. And you’ll tell them that he runs because he loves you. That distance is his love language, and absence is his gift. “You should’ve seen him when he first saw me,” becomes your new excuse, polished until it gleams. You knew too much. There was danger in the heat of your touch. He saw forever in you, and that terrified him. So he smashed it up. Smashed you up. Once I fix me, he’s gonna miss me. That’s your new motto, the one you repeat into the mirror before you dare to meet your own eyes. You tell yourself there’s something wrong with you, something that can be fixed—as if his absence is the symptom of your illness, not his. Even though there’s nothing to fix. Just say when, you’d play again. You’d wind yourself back up and let him take you off the shelf. He was your best friend. And that was the worst part. Because best friends aren’t supposed to destroy you for sport. Best friends aren’t supposed to make you question whether you’re worth keeping. But he took you out of your box. He stole your tortured heart. Left all these broken parts in his wake. Told you you’re better off. But you’re not. ——— The music swells in the ballroom, and the chandelier light glitters like shattered glass over polished floors. You’re smiling again—that careful, plastic curve that doesn’t quite reach your eyes—while inside you’re kneeling in the wreckage of what you once believed was indestructible. He doesn’t even have to be here for you to feel him. Grayson’s absence has weight. It drapes over you like his jacket used to, back when he thought you needed warming. Some part of you still wonders if he thinks about the pieces. If he keeps them somewhere—in a drawer, a pocket, a locked room inside his mind—or if he left them scattered for anyone to step on. And the cruelest part is… you’d let him do it all again. If he came back with that half-smile, with a “hey” like no time had passed, you’d put yourself back together just enough for him to take you apart. Because once you’ve been someone’s favorite toy, it’s hard to be anything else.