by Philippa Greasley
You’re forty? You’re old.
Be told.
Get botox. Reduce your wrinkles. Take hydrolyzed collagen peptides. A UV light mask. A 17-step skincare routine.
Dye your greys.
Take up less space.
Woman of a certain age.
You must (for the male gaze)
You must count all the ways
That life begins at forty.
Providing you still look twenty.
That said, you do you, and if that’s what floats your boat, go all out, if that’s your bag.
But, god, I’m bored.
Isn’t it boring, talking about our faces all the time?
Isn’t it dull, to try to smooth the bedsheet creases in the corners of our eyes?
Because, whether or not I look forty, the Green Tiger Beetle is still so fast, when it runs, it goes blind.
And there are hammerhead sharks, right, and canal towpaths, and the sound of the rain carving a stream on my street outside, and the smell of woodsmoke climbing above a fire.
Oh, and the tide pulls the Thames back to the ocean twice a day and leaves a thousand years of human debris in its wake crunching underfoot claypipes, old coins and roofing tiles from before the Great Fire.
All just there. Right there. As if it’s not the best thing ever.
What good is new skin, anyway, for old feelings?
What good is a smooth shape that doesn’t fit?
What did my body do to deserve this?
Like a wild river map, I pull from the marrow of the earth the most me version of me.
Green and golden, stitched into my bones, an erratic tattoo over and over.
Let me keep getting older.
Philippa Greasley (she/they) is an autistic speech therapist based in Oxfordshire in the UK, working on her first novel, a queernormative YA fantasy. She enjoys exploring the neurodivergent experience in her writing.