I dreamed I was translating silence

I stood in a room where every word had been erased—no echoes, no grammar, just the weight of what wasn’t said. A man handed me a sentence that wasn’t written, just felt: cold, heavy, like a stone wrapped in cloth. I tried to translate it into another language, but the act itself dissolved the meaning. When I woke, my throat ached as if I’d spoken too much, or not enough. The quiet afterward felt less like absence and more like a language waiting to be unlearned.