Occam was a friend of mine, but one day Occam died

I thought she looked best over breakfast, our tired old cartoon strip mugs filled with coffee and too much sugar, overcooked eggs on a plate with too much salt. She was a girl who took well to being disheveled is what, the way her hair goes back to the curls that she always fights against and the little bit of makeup she forgot to wash off is still smudgy around her eyes, but she caught me looking and stared down into her plate, pushed her eggs around with her fork and gave a plaintive quit it.

But I didn’t quit it. I thought I could look enough to catch something more if I only tried. Her covering her mouth while she chewed. Her staring into the middle distance in thought. Her wrapping her feet around the chair legs. I thought these things kept a secret.

Which isn’t that always the tragedy anyway? She could bear the weight of it, maybe, or she couldn’t. Each second I tried to give her a meaning grander than just being her was an assault. It was tyranny. It was my own failure to comprehend and accept reality as something worth believing in. No, I had to have magic at breakfast, magic at every meal, I wanted to be sick to my stomach stuffed with it. And I saw myself looking back at this moment from years later and wondering what had happened, never suspecting the easy, the obvious, the inevitable answer. What had happened was me.