The Applause Before the Ending

The theater has always fascinated me.

Not so much for what happens on stage, but for what happens in the seats: that shared silence, the synchronized breathing, the way everyone waits for the same cue to laugh or cry.

As if what we feel were all ticking under one metronome.

That night was no exception. She wanted to go out, and saying no is always more awkward than just going.

It was one of those plays that sound like they were written by someone who dreamed in another language and translated it badly.

The actors spoke slowly, the silences stretched forever, and I kept thinking more about the air conditioner above my head than the plot.

Until, without warning, someone clapped.

Just one person.

Loudly.

The applause crossed the room from end to end, as if looking for someone else to echo it.

And suddenly, another joined in.
Then another.
And another.

In a matter of seconds, the whole theater was a thunder of applause.

The actors looked at each other, bewildered.
One smiled, another nodded.
They held hands, bowed, and left.

Just like that.

I watched them go, feeling like I’d just seen a magic trick performed backward.

The play wasn’t over, but everyone decided it was.

And because they decided it, it was.

There was no climax, no resolution, no moral.

There was consensus.

A crowd agreeing that the ending had arrived.

And right there, between the echo of applause and the silence that followed, something twisted inside me.

Because I realized we weren’t celebrating an ending: we were inventing it.

On the way home, I couldn’t stop thinking about how easy it is to bend reality when enough people breathe in sync.

Twenty strangers were enough to fold a story.

And they folded it for me, too, even though I hadn’t clapped.

It wasn’t the first time it happened.

History is full of badly timed applause.

I kept thinking about how this wasn’t new. In ’29, a few people got scared and started selling their stocks, and the rest, good imitators of fear, followed. Nobody really knew why, but soon everything collapsed, for everyone.

Salem was the same: a few girls claimed they’d seen the devil, and the whole town decided it was true and went out to hunt him, torches and all. They burned their neighbors to save their souls.

Now we don’t even need to leave the house; a trending topic is enough.

If twenty people get angry on Twitter, the algorithm organizes the procession.

And there we go, all of us, outraged by reflex.

The echo becomes dogma.

A single idea is a spark.

Two identical ideas make a flame.

A hundred repeated ideas become the landscape.

And when the landscape gets too big, no one remembers who lit the first match.

We like to think crowds distort the truth. But they don’t, they redraw it.

They bend it gently, the way gravity bends light.

And they do it with that same tender violence with which we mistake noise for meaning.

When we left the theater, a woman said, very sure of herself:

—What a modern ending, right? So symbolic.
Everyone nodded.
I did too.

Though inside, I laughed, because I understood the symbol wasn’t on the stage, but in us: a group of people unable to bear the emptiness of silence, inventing an ending just to avoid feeling lost.

In the car, she asked what I was thinking about.

I said,

—That sometimes we don’t think because we want to understand, but because we want to agree.

She stayed quiet for a while.

Then she said something that’s still floating in my head:

—And when we agree, we stop seeing.

She was right.

Shared ideas don’t just blind; they bind.

They blind us to the outside, and they tie us to each other.

And there’s the trap: the same bond that protects us from fear is the one that keeps us from escaping it.

When we got home, before falling asleep, I stared at the ceiling.

I thought of that phrase I once heard: ideology doesn’t just blind; it binds.

I finally understood it that night.

Because there’s no real difference between an ideology and an applause:

both need company to make sense.

And both feel true as long as enough people keep clapping.

Maybe, after all, reality is just an applause that hasn’t ended yet.

And maybe the real ending will come when someone dares not to clap.