I dreamed I was the pause between breaths

Not the silence after a gasp, but the quiet before one begins — that suspended moment where the body remembers how to start again. I was standing in a hospital corridor that wasn’t mine, lit by a light that didn’t have a source. No alarms. No voices. Just the slow rise and fall of air I couldn’t feel. And then, someone walked past me — not looking, just passing through — and I knew they were already asleep. I woke up with my hand on my chest, like I’d been holding my breath for hours.