The coffee ring that said more than words

Found this on the library table at 5:17 a.m.—a perfect, dried coffee ring, slightly warped, like a fossil. I sat there for twenty minutes just staring at it, thinking about who left it, what they were trying to say (or not say), and how much language lives in the spaces between. The silence after a sentence is never empty. It’s full of the weight of what came before. I didn’t clean it up. Let it stay.