They go with oils—
carefully measured grief
carried in small, breakable vessels.

Mary Magdalene walks first,
not because she is unafraid,
but because love has already undone her once.

Mary keeps near—
not leading,
not behind—
as if she has learned
how to remain
when everything else departs.

And Salome—
quiet, watchful—
holding the question no one wants to ask aloud:
who will move what we cannot?

Morning has not yet decided
to be light.

The air still carries
Friday in its mouth.

They speak in fragments—
half-formed sentences,
as if language itself
has learned to tread carefully around loss.

Then—

the stone is already gone.

Not broken,
not shattered—
simply…
no longer where it was meant to remain.

This is how it begins:
not with triumph,
but with dislocation.

Inside—

no body.

Only space
where certainty used to lie.

I know this place.

The way absence can feel
more present
than anything it replaces.

A figure waits—
not blazing,
not terrible—
just enough
to disturb the shape of reality.

“Why do you seek—”

but the question does not finish,
because it enters them
before it can be spoken whole.

Risen.

Such a word—

too large for the mouth,
too alive for the grave.

And yet,
it does not close the wound.

It opens it wider—
into something that breathes.

They do not rejoice at once.

They tremble.

Because resurrection
is not comfort—
it is a rearrangement
of everything we thought
could not be undone.

I feel it now—

not as light,
but as a subtle refusal
in the dark places of me
that once accepted endings
as final.

Tell me—

if even death
cannot keep what it claims,

what will you do
with a love
that returns
without asking permission?