Sneezing Vespers Unit Midnight
Clap! Go Ahead; I Dare You!
Sophia: The final curtain. It’s a strange moment, isn’t it? The performance is over, the story told. And all that’s left is the expectation of a sound. A clap. As if the world itself holds its breath and says, “Go ahead. I dare you.”
Mary Anne: A dare? I’ve always thought of it as an ending. A final punctuation. But a dare… that’s an interesting thought. A dare to do what, precisely?
Sophia: To finalise it. To applaud the silence and accept the departure. To acknowledge the empty stage and agree that the show is truly over. A dare to let go.
Mary Anne: (A faint, knowing smile touches her lips.) Ah, but that’s a dare no one with a heart can ever truly win. The stage may appear empty, but it never is. Not really. I have long believed that the people we have cherished, the ones who have taken their bow and departed, are never really gone from us.
Sophia: They remain in the wings?
Mary Anne: They remain in the audience. In us. Their existence simply changes form, from presence to remembrance. The only way for them to face a true oblivion, a second and more final death, is for us to fail in that remembrance. The moment we forget them… that is when they are lost for good.
Sophia: So, the stories we tell ourselves about them, the echoes of their laughter we conjure in a quiet moment, the lessons they taught us that guide our hands—these are not just memories?
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.
— George Eliot (1818-1890)
Mary Anne: They are a form of life. A continuation. Each memory is a thread that keeps them woven into the fabric of the world. To clap, to simply signal an end and move on, is to begin snipping those threads. The dare, then, is a challenge to our own humanity, to our capacity for love.
Sophia: You’re saying the applause is not for the one who has left, but a test for those who remain. To clap and forget is easy. To sit with the silence, to fill it with loving recollection… that requires strength. It is an act of defiance against the void.
Mary Anne: Exactly. It is the sacred duty of the living. We become the custodians of the souls who have touched ours. Their stories become our stories to tell, their light becomes our light to carry. As long as we do that, they cannot be extinguished.
Sophia: (Nodding slowly, a deep understanding in her ancient eyes.) So when the world dares you to clap for the end, to treat it as a finite performance, the wisest response is not to applaud the ending, but to honour the continuity.
Mary Anne: Yes. You hold the memory close. You speak their name. You live in a way that honours the part of them that now lives in you. You let the dare hang in the air, unanswered, because you know the show is never over. The theatre is never empty.
(Sophia gestures to the vast, dark auditorium. For a fleeting moment, it seems to shimmer, filled not with people, but with a billion points of light—flickering, silent, and eternal. The two women sit in comfortable silence, custodians of the stage and all the stories it would ever hold.)
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