When I was in high school, I got my heart ripped to shreds a few days before prom. I was destroyed. As a youngin, your first heartbreak is probably the most painful because for however long the relationship was, you made your entire life about that person so when you break up, you swear your world is ending. I cried really bad the first night. I woke up out of my sleep and woke my sister up in the process. In her tiredness, my sister said “You get three days. Cry it out, kick, scream, listen to sad music, whatever you need, but you only get three days.” That seemed extremely impossible but she was right.
To understand this, you have to understand my big sister. My older sister has suffered a lot through life, physically, mentally, emotionally. She has never fallen though. It amazes me how someone who’s been given every reason to give up just keeps showing up. She wakes up every morning at 5:45am. She gets up, she goes to work, she gets home, she works on her small business, she goes to bed. She wakes up and well you know the rest. She never complains. She does it all with a big smile on her face. With all that she’s been through in life, I have never seen my sister dwell on something for more than three days. No matter how bad something was, she gave it three days.
My sister has fibromyalgia and she’s neurodivergent. Basically, her body hurts reallllllllllly bad all the time and she has squirrels in her brain that don’t let her think straight sometimes. Sometimes she gets really anxious and sad and you wouldn’t know that by looking at her. She’s really strong, not just metaphorically, she really is strong AF, like Luisa from Encanto, and not because it doesn’t hurt but because, in her words, “what am I supposed to do? Not do something because it hurts?” And you know what she’s right. So many of us who are perfectly fine will call out of work for headache meanwhile she’s is at work protecting children from harm all the while she has bad knees, a dislocated hip and a sore back… then going home and fulfilling a bunch of order for her business. And she’ll do this time and time again and never complain.
Now that you know my sister, let me tell you about the rule of three. My sister was always there for me. The good, the bad, the ugly. We shared secrets in that room that nobody knows about. We cried our eyes out in that room and nobody ever heard a peep. We had fights, I hurt her feelings, and she always healed my heart even though she was never the one breaking it. When my boyfriend left me, she told me that if it’s over, what’s the point of crying about it for more than 3 days? Crying won’t bring him back, crying won’t make him want to be with me again. In fact, she told me that crying would actually scare him because boys don’t like sad girls. So I cried for three days. I cried a lot. But once day four came around, I wiped my tears and I went to school. I kept my head held high because more than wanting my boyfriend back, I didn’t want to disappoint my big sister. When day four came around, I had cried all I needed to and I was over it cause my eyes didn’t have any tears left.
As life went on and my heart seemed to never really dodge a bullet, my sister was right there, consoling me but reminding me that you only get three days. No matter what bad thing happened, three days was it. A week was just way too long to dwell on the things that I simply could not change the outcome of by crying. I don’t think I ever saw her cry for more than three days either. She was strong, or at least pretended to be because she knew she had a little sister looking at her following her own rules.
Big sisters are the best thing that have happened to the world. There’s nothing like having someone older than you who knows the world better than you giving you advice on how to navigate through things they already went through. It’s like having the cheat code to a really cool video game. I didn’t always listen to her because of course what little sister would I be if I didn’t rebel just a little bit. But nothing ever went wrong when I did listen to her, no matter how annoying it was. Even now as an adult, I tend to go to my big sister when my mind is unsure of something. Growing up she protected me from all the bad stuff. Going up to the school when I was being bullied. She was there front and center when the boy I thought liked me, leaked some inappropriate pictures of me. My sister was there. Even after I moved miles away, she was there. I had an injury when I first moved to Charlotte and from NYC, my sister found the nearest hospital, called me an uber, got me to the hospital, and checked on me every step of the way. When I told her I was pregnant she rejoiced but really I think I was even happier than her because my son would get to have her in his life as his aunt to help him, to guide him, to teach him the rule of three.
I know that as a big sister, she hid a lot of her pain from me because she wanted to lead by example. Her pain was always worse than mine but if she could deal with it in three days, the little teen stuff I was going through was nothing and could well be resolved in that time frame. She was always with me though. I never had to go through those three days alone. She would play really sad songs sometimes to make sure that I got all my tears out so I wouldn’t have any left at the end of day three. So, if you don’t have a big sister, I want you to take away the best advice that mine ever gave me. You Get Three Days. Whatever it is, no matter how big or small, no exception, Three Days. Because if you can’t fix it, why are you going to let it consume you for longer than that?
A Collection of Wavy Essays 