Waterfalls of Tears

There’s a particular kind of simultaneous quiet and noise that settles in when you stand at the edge of a waterfall. The roar fills your ears, mist cools your face, and the water keeps falling—relentless, indifferent, beautiful. It doesn’t pause to check if anyone is watching. It doesn’t soften for the rocks below. It simply does what it was always going to do.

I’ve stood at quite a few of them over the years, but now in this brain injury recovery the thought arrives uninvited: some sisters are like this. And some of us cry like this too—sudden, heavy, and without apology.

A waterfall doesn’t ask permission to drop. Gravity decides. Once the water reaches the brink, the only direction left is down. There is no negotiation, no “maybe this time will be different.”

That’s the first lesson. Some relationships have already reached the edge long before you notice. You keep hoping for a change in course from them—some softening, some recognition, some ordinary kindness. But the pattern is fixed. The coldness, the rejection, the quiet erasures, the way your achievements are met with silence or your pain with indifference. It keeps falling the same way from them.

And when the realization finally hits, the tears come the same way the water does—fast, unstoppable, blurring everything. You cry in the car. You cry in the shower where no one can hear. You cry until your face hurts and your chest feels hollowed out. The tears don’t fix anything. They just fall.

From a distance, waterfalls are postcard-perfect. People take photos. They write poems. They call them majestic. Up close, the force is different. The spray stings. The noise drowns conversation. The rocks at the bottom are slick and unforgiving.

Water doesn’t smash the rock in a single dramatic strike. It wears it down over years—grain by grain, season by season. The canyon forms slowly, almost politely.

Emotional distance from them works the same way. A missed birthday here. A pointed comment there. A leave me alone every day and confirmed multiple times when you can't believe that to truly be their wishes. But it still is. The way your name is said with a certain flatness. The way your good news is received like an inconvenience. Nothing large enough to name as cruelty on any single day. Yet cruelty every day still saying ‘leave me alone’. Nothing they'd want to share or have missed in the chasm of rejection. But over time the shape of you changes because of that daily continued rejection from them. You learn to flinch before the water even reaches you. You start protecting the soft parts without realizing you’ve done it because of the pain they cause you and your family every day.

And sometimes the only evidence left is the crying—sudden, private waterfalls that appear when a song plays or a memory surfaces. By the time you notice the canyon, it’s already deep, and your eyes are still wet.

But you are not the water.

Standing at a waterfall, it’s easy to feel small. The volume is overwhelming. The force seems absolute. But the water is not you. You are the person on the bank—or, if you’re lucky, the person who eventually walks away from the edge when all they cause is harm today, again.

You do not have to keep throwing yourself over the drop in the hope that this time the landing will be softer. You do not have to explain the physics of gravity to someone who has already decided the direction of the flow. You do not have to stay wet just because the mist feels familiar.

Some sisters will never turn into gentle streams. The current was set long ago by the treacherous paths they chose with nothing but the fall of a drop off ahead. Accepting that is not bitterness. It is simply accurate observation—the same way you accept that the waterfall will keep falling whether you approve or not. And the tears? They are allowed. They are not weakness. They are the body’s way of releasing what the heart can no longer hold.

Waterfalls do not hate the rocks they wear down. They are not cruel on purpose. They are simply doing what water does when the ground drops away.

That distinction matters. Some sisters are not villains in a story. They are people whose capacity for love toward you was limited, damaged, or absent. Ruined by choices they made and keep making. Naming the absence does not require you to invent malice where there may only be emptiness. But it also does not require you to keep offering yourself to the drop—or to keep crying for a change that will never come.

There are other places where the water moves differently. Places where it pools, where it reflects the sky, where it is quiet enough that you can hear your own voice again—and where the only waterfalls are the ones you choose to stand beside, not the ones that keep drowning you. Until they figure out how to be without eroding all the good things around them, we can't.

The waterfall will keep falling without you. Your tears will eventually slow. That is not a tragedy. That is simply the nature of water—and of the choices of certain sisters.