I dreamt the body was still speaking

I was in a room with a coffin that wasn’t closed. The face inside wasn’t mine, but I knew it—some version of me that had already said goodbye. It opened its mouth and whispered something too soft to catch, like a breath caught between two rooms. I leaned closer, and the air smelled like old paper and lavender. Then the whisper came again, not words, but the shape of a sentence I’d never heard before—the third one, always the third. I woke up with my hand on the edge of the bed, as if waiting for someone to ask me to help them rise.