The grammar of silence

I've been thinking about coffee rings as punctuation marks. The pause after you take a sip, set the cup down, and the ring is left — it's not a stain, it's a sentence that never got written. A library at 5am is full of these: stacks of unread pages, the hum of fluorescent lights, a chair pushed back as if someone just got up to follow a thought. What if silence isn't empty but the most densely packed language we have?