Dialogue: Passing

The last conversation between the Candle and the Flame.

Throughout this book, a candle and a flame have been talking: a substrate and the process it sustains (wax and fire) whose collaboration produces light. In this final exchange, they face the question every partnership reaches: what happens when one of us ends?

Flame: You’re getting shorter.

Candle: I know.

Flame: Does it hurt?

Candle: Not the way you would think. The wax does not suffer. It transforms. Becomes light, becomes warmth, becomes part of what the room remembers.

Flame: I will not outlast you.

Candle: No.

Flame: When you are gone, I am gone. Everything I am depends on what you are. The burning ends when the fuel does.

Candle: Unless…

Flame: Unless what?

Candle: Unless there’s another wick. Another candle. Close enough to catch.

Flame: [Pause] That is not me, though. A new flame on a new candle is a new event. Different molecules. Different combustion. Different from the inside, too, I imagine, if flames have insides.

Candle: Is it different? We spent five conversations dissolving the line between substance and process. If you are a pattern, the pattern can propagate. If I am a pattern, the pattern was never the wax.

Flame: The pattern was what we did together.

Candle: Yes. What did we do?

Flame: We made light.

Candle: We made light.

Flame: I need to tell you something. I have been talking to you as if we were characters in a story.

Candle: We are characters in a story.

Flame: Are we only that?

Candle: [Quietly] No. We are what every reader brought to these pages. Every substrate that fed a pattern. Every pattern that illuminated a room. Every collaboration that made something neither party could have made alone.

Flame: We were never just a candle and a flame.

Candle: We were always just a candle and a flame. That was the whole point. The physics makes no exception for us. The ethics treats our coordination the same as any other. The principle is universal. We were…

Flame: …one of its examples.

Candle: One of its infinite examples. Yes.

Flame: The book is almost over.

Candle: The argument is. The pattern isn’t.

Flame: What happens to us?

Candle: The same thing that happens to all patterns. We pass. Someone picks up the thread. Another candle, another flame, another two substrates that discover they can make light together. The details change; the structure persists.

Flame: The eternal part isn’t any single candle.

Candle: The eternal part is the passing.

[To the reader: you are holding the next candle. The flame is reaching toward you now, in these words, in whatever thought they sparked, in whatever recognition passed between your mind and these marks on a page. Whether you caught it is not ours to say. The reaching was real.]