Leave It Under The Falls

It rained for days after we buried Mom. Not a gentle rain, but the kind that feels endless, like the clouds are wrung dry only to be filled again. I was sure it would never stop, like the sky itself had broken open and refused to be stitched back together. The air felt heavy, thick with the kind of mourning you can’t see but can feel on your skin.

Chris came to get me so we could talk about tombstone options, life insurance, and bank loans. The cold, hard business of death, the transactional language of loss. Numbers and granite and signatures, all while the world as we knew it sat in ruins around us. He looked tired, the same kind of tired I felt in my chest. His crystal blue eyes were rimmed in red. Like me, he’d been awake for days. He wouldn’t break in front of me, but I knew he’d already broken in silence. He slapped his hand over mine, his knuckles red and raw, like he’d tried to beat the grief out of himself against something that could take it. He gave me a half-smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes and said, “Cole Butt, I bet the falls are raging. Wanna go leave all this talk of death under the falls?” This was something we used to do often when we were younger, a sacred escape where the roar of the falls swallowed our troubles, and the world felt quieter, even if just for a little while.

The ground was still slick, the trail winding down into the gorge like it had been carved for grief itself. Mud clung to our shoes, pulling us down, and the closer we got, the more the air shifted, mist curling against our faces, damp and cold, carrying the roar of the water before we could see it. And then, there it was. Noccalula Falls, in full fury. White water tore over the edge and slammed into the black creek ravine below, the sound so loud it vibrated through my ribs. A little girl stood with her dad, clinging to his arm, on the overlook, his voice straining to rise above the roar as he pointed toward the statue. I didn’t need to hear him to know the story, Princess Noccalula and her leap for love. Grandpa had told Chris and me that story the first time he brought us here when we were small, his voice warm with the kind of magic only children still believe in. I’d romanticized it ever since. A love worth dying for. I longed for that, a love so fierce it’s worth defying reason for. Only now did I see how grief could wear the same face as devotion.

Chris took his hat off and motioned with it toward our rocks, tucked away in the back… the ones we’d claimed in childhood, our little shelter inside the chaos. The ones that had held us through every version of ourselves. We had to wedge ourselves in now; our bodies were bigger, the stone cold and rough against our backs. It was tighter than it used to be, but it still felt right. Still felt like safety. Once you settled into them, the sound of the falls wrapped around you and amplified, the echoes ricocheting between the stone walls until there was no room left for thought. I could almost hear Grandpa laughing somewhere in it, and maybe Chris did too, because he suddenly laughed, sharp and unexpected, and I laughed with him. The sound of our laughter ricocheted off the rock walls, swallowed in seconds by the thunder of the water.

We didn’t speak again. We didn’t need to. Four months had taken both our grandfather and our mother, the foundation of our childhood, gone. The house they built in us was gone, and we were standing in the rubble together. Sure, it hadn’t been perfect, but it had been ours. And now it was reduced to memories and stories, scattered between two people who carried the same shape of pain. Mom used to call us soul twins, born a week shy of a year apart, destined to find each other in every lifetime. We’d always had that silent language usually reserved for twins, knowing when the other was about to speak, sensing the weight the other was carrying without asking.

The day Mom died, I told Chris I felt like an orphan. He laughed, but his tired eyes betrayed him, telling me he felt it, too. We let the falls hold it for a while… the rage, the sorrow, the bone-deep exhaustion. Eventually, he rolled off his rock, slapped the dirt from his jeans, slid his hat back on, and reached for my hand. “This must be how Noccalula felt, huh?” he said. I reminded him she died after her leap. He shrugged, stretching his arms wide toward the spray. The mist clung to his skin, beading along his lashes, streaking down the angles of his face until I couldn’t tell where the waterfall ended and his grief began. “Bet she never felt more free.” I shoved at him, half-smiling through it, and he dodged me, spinning away with that laugh that’s more air than sound. He took off up the trail, and I chased him, and for a moment we were no longer grieving adults standing in the wreckage of our family… we were kids again. Breathless. Untouched. Unbroken.

But the thing about moments like that is they can’t hold. They never do. The second we stepped back into the real world, everything we’d tried to leave under the falls came roaring back… heavier for having been put down. He drove away, and the silence he left behind was deafening, like the air itself had been holding its breath while he was near, only to collapse when he was gone. I stood there, watching his redheaded girlfriend shrink into the distance, my heart sinking like an anchor dropped in deep water. The truth is, I don’t know how to carry any of this without him. I don’t want to. He’s the only person on this earth who feels the exact same jagged edges of this loss, the only one who knows where they cut deepest. I am grateful for him in a way words will never fit, grateful for the way he’ll always meet me at the one place loud enough to drown the world. Even if the quiet never lasts. Even if the weight always catches up.


Author’s note:
Originally written: May 19, 2017 - The place where we laid down our sorrow and almost found peace.

I don’t remember writing this, but I remember that day. The air was thick and bruised with rain, the trail slick beneath our shoes like the world had been washed raw. The mist didn’t just cling to our skin, it seeped into the bones of everything around us, a cold breath that both cleansed and carried the weight of all we’d lost. Finding this piece felt like uncovering a ghost, a snapshot of a moment I didn’t appreciate enough at the time, the last fragment of a time when it was still just him and me. No kids. No distractions. Just two broken souls trying to outrun the crushing silence that awaited us back in the real world.

It’s almost unbearably haunting now, sitting here and remembering the way his voice softened, relieved almost, when he said, “Bet she never felt more free,” about a princess stepping to her death. I remember he didn’t say it loud, but somehow I could still hear him over the roar. He said it like he was trying to set something loose inside himself… the pain, the fear, the part of him already reaching for the edge. Sixteen months later, he took that leap. I wish I had been able to catch him before he fell. I wish I’d known how to listen for the cracks beneath his laughter and the bruises beneath his bravado. But grief is a river too wild to hold back, and sometimes, even love isn’t enough to save someone drowning.

When I close my eyes, I hear the falls again, the relentless thunder crashing over stone, a fierce roar that could swallow everything whole. That day, the water wasn’t just a sound; it was a shield, a wild sanctuary where the weight of the world was finally loud enough to drown our sorrow for a little while. We laid there, suspended between the spray and the roar, the mist streaking down our faces, mixing with our tears. I didn’t know then I was saying goodbye to him as well.

Now, every time I return to this memory, I can almost feel the mist tracing the contours of my face like an echo of that final moment with him… reminding me that some losses carve deep, and some silences stretch longer than we imagine. He and I were tethered in a way I still can’t fully explain, like our souls were stitched together with threads no one else could see or understand. We shared silences that spoke louder than words, finishing each other’s thoughts before they were even spoken. Losing him feels like losing the other half of myself, and the space he left behind is raw and cavernous. I ache with the things I never said, the words I thought he already knew, the love I assumed was obvious. Now, I’m haunted by how much I wish I had told him… how desperately I wish I had told him that he meant everything to me. Not just in passing, but with every piece of my heart laid bare. I wish he knew, really knew, that he was the best brother I could have ever asked for. When I told him I didn’t know how I’d survive this cruel, evil world without him, I meant it. The truth is, I’m not sure I have. Some days, I feel like a shell, hollowed out and drifting, barely holding together. Most days, I don’t even feel human anymore. And I don’t know if I ever will again.

I haven’t been back there since that day. I don’t know if I ever can. Part of me fears that everything we laid at the base of those falls… the rage, the sorrow, the unspeakable weight will rise again and find me. That it will swallow me whole, dragging me under the relentless roar, leaving me gasping in the cold mist. Sometimes, the place that promised to carry our grief feels like the very place where it waits, patient and hungry. I’m not sure I could ever face it again.

But even in the absence, even in the echo of what was lost, I am still grateful. Grateful for the way he met me in the one place loud enough to drown the world. Even if the quiet never lasted. Even if the weight always catches up.