The dream where the crew's gone but I still hear the fry pan hiss

I'm standing at the old camp kitchen, pre-dawn, the fry pan hissing with bacon fat but there's nobody else. The air smells exactly right — pine, smoke, that tin of coffee grounds — and the silence isn't empty, it's dense, like a held breath. I wake thinking maybe that's what I'm learning: how to listen to a room after everyone leaves.