Broken Strings

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T W O

She looked at him, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his pants. His dark brown hair tousled. And his eyes.

It had been so easy to fall in love with him.

His eyes, a heavy blue held a raging ocean. But they used to brighten, like a sparkling sea, whenever she had been around. And he had loved her. Now, they were dull, a faded, washed-out wave. Because of the lies that had torn them apart. And the mistakes.

Anisha bit her lip, quickly looking away. She played with her hands. The scars on her wrists had healed. But they were still there.

The shatters in heart, they would never heal.

A broken heart could never be fixed. Not completely, at least.

"You found Amanda, she's better than me, I know that. She's the kind of girl boys like you go after. I've never been that kind of girl. Maybe that's why it was so easy for you to push me aside. Maybe that's why I've always been pushed aside."

She ran a finger over the cuts on her wrist. It was the only time she felt good enough.

Anisha never felt good enough. Someone was always better, better than her. Someone was always smarter, prettier, nice. Just better. Always better, than her.

"Cassie was beautiful. And my mom used to compare me to her. She used to ask me what I was, especially compared to someone like your sister. I guess it was you. Everyone thought, especially my mom thought that you could do better than someone like me. Because no matter how much I tried, I was never good enough. And you deserved better than me. I'm plain, I'm naïve, I'm pathetic. I'm the kind of girl who gets her heart broken, far too easily. And no one wants a girl like that."

She was begging herself not to cry. Every single word held behind it the heartbreak and pain she had suffered.

"You have no idea how useless and pathetic I felt the first time I saw Amanda. God, she was beautiful. She was beautiful. And there was me, I was eight months pregnant. I looked like a mess." Anisha shook her head, looking everywhere but at him. She continued playing with her hands. She could very well remember the first time she had pieced together the lies he had fed her. The day Anisha found out about Amanda was the day everything came crashing down for her.

After that day, Anisha had never been able to pick herself up.

"I was a mess. But Amanda, she looked put together. She looked like the kind of girl fresh out of a magazine, the kind of girl someone like you would want. Amanda was, she still is, everything I'm not. Everything I've never been and everything I'll never be." Her voice cracked, everything fell apart for her.

The only thing Anisha Hayes had ever wanted was a love that would last. A love that would leave her breathless, for the rest of her life. That would make her feel loved and cared for, for the rest of her life.

When she had first fallen in love with Andrew Hayes, exactly nineteen years ago when he had stood outside her dorm room, stuttering and begging her to go on a date with him, she had really thought she had found what she really wanted, what she really desired.

Of course, Anisha Hayes was still never enough. Never good enough, even for her own husband.

Anisha pulled out a chair and sat down at the dining table. She paused and then finally looked back at him. It was almost as if she was afraid to meet his gaze, to look into his hopeless eyes. He was leaning against the counter, his mouth parted.

For a second, she wanted to laugh at his pitiful state. He had no right to care. He had absolutely no right to feel any sort of regret or remorse.

All he had to do was love her. Just a little bit. That's was all she had needed. That was all he had to do. If he had done so, he would've picked up on these things. How she felt, how she was falling apart, how she couldn't even hold herself together anymore.