Cassandra in Reverse

by Holly Smale

I rarely understand what another human is thinking, but I frequently feel it: a wave of emotion that pours out of them into me, like a teapot into a cup. While it fills me up, I have to work out what the hell it is, where it came from and what I’m supposed to do to stop it spilling everywhere.

My theory is that my brain is like a lazy IT department, and every time there’s a problem with the electrics it just panics and pulls the plug out at the wall.

What the hell is going on? In fairness, I didn’t check my emails at all today: maybe the missing contextual information I need is sitting in my inbox.

His voice is buoyant but stiff at the same time, like a floating log.

My boyfriend sounds tired, as if having dinner with me is like climbing a mountain in inappropriate footwear.

In one way or another, this is what my relationships always boil down to: a failure to “connect,” as if I’m a broken piece of Lego that no other bits of Lego can click on to.

“How am I?” I say blankly. “Stuck in a time loop, Barry. Cheating the laws of time and space, but unable to elaborate further at this point.”

Evaluating the evidence, it appears that I have moved through time but not through space;

Is this specific location some kind of magic portal or are my new powers portable? It’s unclear, so that will obviously have to be investigated further.

There are a million possible moments I would probably return to and change if I could: tiny decisions that have quietly carved my life in the wrong direction, like water running over a rock. Things I shouldn’t have said. Things I shouldn’t have done.

My girl is a bit of a wizard in the kitchen, by which I mean she magically turns edible ingredients into shit you can’t eat.”

Although I can certainly see why my proficiency might be in question. Sometimes I stop understanding basic words, or how to use them, and get mixed up for no reason.

Flying by the seat of your pants is a massively overrated aviation term, in my opinion.

Will approaches life like it’s the start of the Odyssey and he can’t wait to get cracking.

can travel through time, which means I can draw the day in pencil and then simply erase it when it’s done. I can have a holiday whenever I feel like it.

“Disarmingly beautiful is the look I was going for this morning. I toyed with endearingly ravishing, but sadly that particular shirt was in the wash.”

do know what came over me. It’s exactly what always comes over me when someone breaks rules, no matter how totally arbitrary they seem to be. Something in my brain snaps, and I detonate like a hand grenade. Which is incredibly hypocritical, given how happy I am to ignore rules if I don’t personally agree with them.

I’m steeped in color like a tea bag and they run into each other and hurt my eyes and the volume turns up, sears my skin, prickles my spine, and it’s too much, it’s too much, it’s too bright, too loud, too big, and I cannot, I cannot, I—

abandoned T-shirts and jumpers and boxers sit exactly where they were dropped, as if humans spontaneously evaporated while still wearing them.

Oh my God: have I screwed with the universe to such an extent now that I have somehow made an entire dog from scratch?

All I know is I am consistently being told that I am oblivious to the emotions and feelings of those around me—even though I’m trying my absolute hardest—yet nobody seems to notice them when they’re mine.

I suddenly realize: I’m not traveling through time to undo the things I’ve done wrong or the decisions I’ve made. I am trying to undo myself.

It would be so easy: to rewind time, hear the knock, not answer the door. But I suddenly don’t want to. I’m getting sick of traveling through time. All it seems to do is carry me to places I don’t want to be.

One wrong move and it’s going to blow up again. I just don’t know what the right move is, because I still can’t read the situation. What is going on?

This isn’t how time works. It can’t be. It doesn’t have wormholes that just zoom you forward or backward like a giant, cosmic game of snakes and ladders.

That’s the thing I’ve never really understood about emotions. We’re given unhelpful words for them—sad, happy, angry, scared, disgusted—but they’re not accurate and there never seems to be anywhere near enough of them. How could there be? Emotions aren’t binary or finite: they change, shift, run into each other like colored water. They are layered, three-dimensional and twisted; they don’t arrive in order, one by one, labeled neatly. They lie on top of each other, twisting like kaleidoscopes, like prisms, like spinning bird feathers lit with their own iridescence.

“Three.” I shrug. “Two, maybe. I remember pretty much everything, almost like it’s all kind of happening now. It gets...confusing.” I suppose time doesn’t mean anything when you remember everything.

Time is fragile; for every sweep of the broom, there are consequences.

Nothing requires comfort quite like discovering you’ve traveled through time and space only to set your boyfriend up with your little sister.

Also, Will has now dumped me in three different timelines; at some point, you’ve just got to let yourself stay dumped.

There are infinite things you can do with time. You can save it, spend it, stitch it, kill it. You can beat it, steal it and watch it fly. You can do time and set it; you can waste it and keep it; it can be good or bad, on your side or against you. You can have a whale of it; be in the nick of it or behind it; you can have it on your hands. Memories are time travel, and so are regrets, hopes and daydreams. When we die, the people we love carry us forward into it.

properly.” I swallow what feels like a tidal wave of guilt. For someone who finds lying so physically painful, I sure seem to be capable of doing it quite effectively.

Artemis leans across the table and puts one finger on top of my hand. It’s what she’s done ever since we were little because she knows I don’t love being touched: it’s our version of a hug.

Finally, this book does not represent autism, and neither I nor Cassie represent autistic people. We are simply individual voices in a choir of millions of amazing neurodivergent people, all with our own experiences, our own ways of seeing the world, our own ways of existing.

I urge you to seek out other autistic voices. We are beautiful, we are unique, and we are legion.