I was 28 searching Père Lachaise
for Proust’s tombstone, wandering through
the trees and graves as the air of spirits licked
my neck in the woods, probably thinking
how the year before I was struck by
the terror of ageing
in Time Regained:
it must be, I’d thought,
that we stop before we get old,
and then, after,
what continues is
a grotesque appropriation of our flesh.
Later, when I was drunk on free wine from a bookshop,
I tried to describe the grave to an American
but all I had was the capitalized surname
and a youthful love of emptiness. 

Now at 36, in plague times, I find myself alone
and I find myself in a multi-season show
with many incomplete arcs for many forgotten guest stars.
And 36 is not old but it’s old enough
to see life being done to me and
to come across posts by actors from 90s’ sci-fi cults
whose characters
used to occupy my mind
in that total way only unreal people can,
with their imagined worlds burrowing
into the roots of my futures,
a wholeness of hypotheticals
and non-corporeal communities,
and now the faces I see on a smaller screen
aren’t the ones I grew up with:
they are dodgy masks worn by strangers
yet they are cruel revelations
as they are forced participation in years.
I do not recognise them as I do not recognise myself
in their transformations. 

When Cassandra spoke of the coming devastation
she was told her prophesies were preposterous.

Cassandra’s life is one of normal things:
she sits around or goes for long walks;
she speaks to loved ones over screens;
she distracts herself with cultural ephemera
or she lets her feelings seep into the furniture
so she can observe them as objects
that will eventually be discarded. 

I went out to the pier and watched the sea
be interrupted by an island 

It’s strange how I have this continuity within me
when so many selves have perished

The unstoppable regularity of the tide terrifies me

There are some days when you know the world is ancient
and you know your place in it is temporary
and you realise you have to live with knowing
all is out there and real yet still a figment
of the waters that swell inside you 

and, I’m finding, ageing starts to become a plea –  

please, please, please
let me mean something
and let me mean nothing at all.

Cassandra Moss was born in Manchester. She studied English with Film at King's College, London and subsequently worked in the film industry for Sister Films, Working Title, and Vertigo. Since 2009, she's been an ESL teacher. After moving to Ireland, she recently completed an MPhil in Linguistics at Trinity College, Dublin. She now lives and writes by the sea. Her writing has been published in Succour, 3am Magazine, Cricket Online Review, Squawk Back, And/Or, The Passage Between, Posit, Underwood Press, Sunspot Lit, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, KAIROS Literary Magazine, and The Bangalore Review.