The Weight of the Stone

 It is late on the night of Black Saturday. Outside, the Metro is holding its breath.

The last two days have felt like a blur of extremes. On Maundy Thursday, the streets were bleeding with people. From my window, I watched the crowds doing their Visita Iglesia, walking miles in the suffocating heat, moving from church to church to ask for forgiveness or beg for a miracle. I watched them dragging their tired feet, driven by a desperate, beautiful kind of faith. I watched them, and then I went back to bed, paralyzed by the fact that I couldn't even find the energy or the "faith" to walk to my own kitchen.

Then came Good Friday. The Metro became a ghost town. The malls were shuttered, the usually congested EDSA was an empty strip of concrete, and the local channels on TV were either pure static or broadcasting the Siete Palabras. The old folks have a saying for Good Friday: "Patay ang Diyos" (God is dead). They tell you not to make noise, not to travel, and to be careful not to get wounded, because without God, wounds don't heal. Yesterday, that superstition didn’t feel like a myth. It felt like a diagnosis. The whole world had finally stopped to match the absolute emptiness inside my chest.

And then there was today. Sabado de Gloria. A day of limbo.

There were no dramatic processions today, no loud passions, just the heavy, uncomfortable silence of a tomb waiting for a resurrection. I spent the entire day doing exactly what I do every other day: waking up at noon, staring at the ceiling fan, and feeling the exact same void. Because the truth is, unemployment in your thirties is a perpetual Black Saturday. You are constantly trapped in the waiting room of your own life, sitting in the dark, wondering if your personal "Easter" is ever going to come, or if you're just going to be stuck under the stone forever.

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday. The bells will ring, people will put on their best clothes, and the world will celebrate "new life." But I don't feel ready to resurrect. I don't have a job to go back to on Monday. I just have the same haze, the same quiet room, and the same blinking cursor on a resume I can't bring myself to send.

I almost didn't open my laptop tonight. It felt almost sacrilegious to break the silence of the tomb. But the silence in my head was getting too loud.

If you are sitting in a dark room tonight, listening to the distant hum of the city slowly winding back up, feeling like your own wounds are never going to heal... I know the feeling. The world expects us to rise tomorrow, but maybe we don't need to force our resurrection just because the calendar says so.

Maybe it’s okay to just sit in the quiet of Black Saturday for as long as we need to. The stone is heavy, and the air is thin, but we are still breathing underneath it.

How did you survive the silence today?