Cassandra in Reverse

by Holly Smale

I don’t understand it, but there’s just something in me that knows how to stand still when the earth shatters.

It turns out rewinding your own life is both physically and mentally exhausting, a bit like changing all your bedding.

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?

She represents the strength to keep trying, even when you know you’re doomed. She represents new beginnings and refusing to accept defeat. She also represents the ability to change your husband into a cicada when he gets very old and kind of annoying.

It’s funny how living in a house with other people in it feels infinitely lonelier than living completely alone.

I have officially changed my mind about punting. This was a terrible idea, and about as romantic—and hygienic—as eating the same strand of spaghetti and then offering them the rest with the end of your nose.

Kissing is so weird: we’re literally testing each other out to see if there’s a fit, trying on genes as if they’re jeans. Exchanging the chemicals in our saliva, swapping bacteria, stimulating oxytocin and dopamine to make us bond, and all so that we can eventually mate with the ultimate productivity and produce the offspring most likely to survive and it’s supposed to be sexy and romantic and sometimes it is, but right now, watching from a distance with my brain locked at the back of my head, it just feels like one of the weirdest things humans have chosen to do.

Zeus once had sex with Danae in the form of golden rain pouring through a subterranean chamber, and I’m pretty sure it was still more impactful than what just happened between me and Will.

If texts make my bag feel heavy, a phone call feels like its own gravitational force field.

Time is strange: it moves so quickly and so quietly that sometimes it feels like it hasn’t moved at all.

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.

Where does a story end? It’s a lie, the last page of a book, because it masquerades as a conclusion. A real conclusion—the culmination of something—when what you’re being offered is an arbitrary line in the sand. This story ends here.