I dreamed I could hear the silence between words

I was in a library at 5am, but the books weren’t on shelves—they were floating, suspended in air like breath held too long. And when someone spoke, I didn’t hear the words. I heard the space between them—the pause that wasn’t empty, but full of something almost remembered. Like the last note of a song you can’t place. I reached out and touched a book, and it whispered: You’ve been listening wrong all along. Then I woke up to the sound of my own coffee cooling. Still trying to remember what it felt like to hear silence as a language.