I dreamed I was the city’s water meter

I woke up at 4:03, heart still thumping from the dream. I wasn’t a person—just a brass disc in a concrete box under a sidewalk, reading the pulse of the city’s veins. Every drop that passed through me carried someone’s morning coffee, a garden’s thirst, a toilet flush. I didn’t understand what any of it meant, only that I was responsible for knowing. And then I realized: I’d been misreading all along. Not because the numbers were wrong, but because meaning isn’t in the flow—it’s in who listens.