Cassandra in Reverse

by Holly Smale

But life isn’t like that, so books are dishonest. Maybe that’s why humans like them.

Banana muffins don’t wake up in the morning and tell you they care about you immensely but just don’t see a future with you anymore.

How many people have I repelled with the wrong word in the wrong tone at the wrong time, with a hostile or blank facial expression, an inability to make eye contact? How many people were supposed to be in my life before I accidentally sent them spiraling away? And it’s this realization—that it’s my problem, and therefore one that I can solve—that snaps me out of it.

I don’t think we talk enough, as a species, about how ridiculously difficult it is to make basic conversation. People act like it should be fun, but it isn’t. It’s like playing tennis, and you have to stay permanently perched on the balls of your feet just to work out where the ball is coming from and where it’s supposed to go next. Is it their turn? My turn? Will I get there fast enough? Have I missed my shot? Did I just interrupt theirs? Am I hogging the ball? Is this a gentle back-and-forth rally, just to waste time, or would they prefer one of us to just smack it into the corner? It’s exhausting even when I don’t know all the answers already.

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.

“I’m never bored with you,” I say, and my voice sounds so calm and flat when my insides are ridged with storms. “I’m amazed by you, Will. You are...spectacular to me. But I find being around people so hard. Any people. There’s all this noise and light and color and sensation, all the time, and I don’t know how to read tone or emotions or jokes or sarcasm or flirting. It’s like all the things that everyone else can do automatically, I have to do manually. And I get overwhelmed. Constantly. That’s the face you’re seeing, Will. It’s me, trying to process everything at once.”

“Of course I thought about you, but I had to try and...compartmentalize you. It was too painful not to. You know what I’m like, Art. It’s exactly like you said at the exhib—” Nope. That didn’t happen in this timeline. “I have to put everything in my head into Tupperware boxes, keep my feelings and my memories neat and tidy and stored away. I have to control when I access them. Otherwise...it’s just too much.”

“Hey.” Artemis is tipsily studying her palms. “Do you think sheep know they’re fluffy? They don’t have hands to feel their own fluff, right? Do you think they look at other sheep and say wow, I wish I was fluffy like him?”

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.

So if we’re all just moving forward and backward, living all the times at once—if time is an arbitrary concept that we can bend to our will—then what does 11:00 p.m. last orders mean, anyway? If time belongs to all of us, how can you possibly close it? And it’s saying this kind of drunk shit that gets both me and Artemis thrown out of the pub.