regardless

I am missing, no matter how deep into my ruble of papers I search, a sachet of coffee. I've tilted my desk and it's not among the items that fell over. I've lifted each cat in the bedroom and it's not under them either. Under the bed, the space under cabinets, the nooks where my cats hide my stuff they steal when I'm looking elsewhere. Not there.

Maybe I had consumed it and hadn't noticed. I look in the trash bin. Nothing Maybe I disposed of the wrapper elsewhere. Maybe I never bought that sachet in the first place.

I retrace my steps, rewind the morning as it unfolded. I kicked the blanket down and crawl out of bed. I heard the PC humming to life after I switched it on. My neighbor was playing "Staying Alive," which I could hear when I fixed my first cup of coffee in the kitchen. Got a little irked when I saw the newspaper in disarray; the cats must have been looking for the classified ads. Maybe they want to move out. Then I went back upstairs to write. And then now. No remembrance of where I put that other sachet.

There is a paraphrase of Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is usually the best one. My cats stole that sachet of coffee. They have stolen and hidden stuff before. They could do it again. Fine, they did it. Or I consumed it without remembering where I disposed of the wrapper. My memory's playback is suspect. Or I must have never bought a sachet in the first place. All of these are plausible. No real evidence for any single one of these hypotheses. So much for science.

A leap of faith, maybe. That might help. Which hypothesis feels most intuitively true? The cat theory. Yeah, that one. Why? If I have to explain that intuition, it's because my cats are cute and they steal stuff from my desk. Paperclips, post-its, receipts. No point in this. I couldn't find any stolen stuff where my cats usually hide them. And no point in defending an intuition. An intuition does not need any defense.

Either way I want my second fix of caffeine.

This a time when neither science nor faith helps you arrive at a decision. My investigation can drag on and on and still I would not find contentment. I just have to make that decision myself, regardless of scientific or religious truth.

I'm going out to buy some coffee. Regardless.