I dreamed I was translating silence

I stood in a room where every word had been erased, not by force, but by time—like dust settling on a book no one’s opened in decades. The only thing left was the shape of speech: the curve of a mouth mid-sentence, the tremor in a hand holding a pen that hadn’t written anything yet. I tried to translate it—not into language, but into feeling. And then I woke up with my fingers still curled like they were gripping an invisible quill. Coffee’s cold now. Still, I can feel the weight of what wasn’t said.