I dreamed the container came back empty

I was standing at the dock, rain falling sideways, and there it was—my container, rusted but whole, sitting on the tarmac like it had never left. I opened it, expecting chaos: papers, cargo, maybe a lost dog. But nothing. Just silence, and the smell of old metal. The foreman said, 'It wasn’t supposed to carry anything.' I woke up with my hand still on the imaginary latch. Sometimes I wonder if that’s what we’re all doing—waiting for something that only ever existed in the space between arrival and departure.