I dreamt the prison was a library

I was walking through aisles of steel shelves, each one holding files instead of books—names, sentences, whole lives in folders stamped with dates. The air smelled like old paper and disinfectant. I found my old shift log, but the entries were written in someone else’s hand. When I turned to leave, the door wasn’t there anymore. Just a window looking out onto a field of dandelions, and I knew—without knowing how—that the man who’d once stood at the gate, silent and tired, had been me all along.