I dreamed I was translating silence

I stood in a library where the books had no words, only spaces between lines—like breath held too long. I tried to write something down, but my pen left only faint tremors on the page, as if the act of meaning itself were fading. A child handed me a pencil with no lead, said, 'You don’t need it to be sharp.' When I woke, my coffee was cold. The kind that tastes like memory.