First of all—
I didn’t mean to live this long.
It just kind of happened
between panic attacks and rent payments
and falling in love with people
who laughed like sirens in reverse.
One day I woke up
and somebody called me “elder,”
and I almost checked my pulse.
Then I remembered—
queer years run on dog-time.
You survive past thirty and suddenly
you’re the forest ranger
for every lost teenager in the county.
I don’t have wisdom.
I have receipts.
And scars that healed into
really good punchlines.
Listen—
no one tells you how to age
when your childhood burned itself
for kindling.
No one warns you
that joy, too, grows stretch marks,
that you can love people
like gospel and still
have to leave the church.
But here’s what I know:
The world will always try
to flatten you into a symbol.
Resist it.
Be the wrinkle.
Be the typo.
Be the dirt under the fingernail of the divine.
Find your people,
not the perfect ones—
the ones who make you laugh while you’re crying,
who text you I’m outside when you’ve said nothing for days.
Hold them the way you wish someone had held you.
Then let go.
Then hold them again.
You are not too much.
You are the correct volume
in a world that keeps trying
to turn you down.
Yes, it’s terrifying.
Everything worth doing is.
Love anyway.
Make things.
Leave notes.
Feed the strays.
Say I love you first
and worse—
mean it.
If someone tells you
you’re brave,
laugh.
Tell them bravery is just fear
with better PR.
You will outlive so many of the wrong people.
You will build joy from leftover parts.
You will look at a sunrise one morning
and realize you made it—
that you’ve become the story
you needed to hear.
And when some kid,
voice trembling,asks how you did it,
you’ll shrug and say:
I didn’t. I’m still doing it.
That’s the secret; there isn’t one.
Just the quiet revolution of staying.
Just the wild, ordinary magic
of calling this life ours.
Laura Fair Schulz, Daughter of Leucippus (after Rubens (2025)
This poem originally appeared in Locust Review #13 (Winter 2025/2026)
Tish Turl is an author and artist who writes what they call “class-revenge fanfiction.” They are a member of the Locust Arts & Letters Collective and an editor for Locust Review. Tish also works on the Born Again Labor Museum. Their published work includes the serialized novella Sound, the short stories, “Space Goths,” “Memez,” and “Sewerbot,” the serialized poems of the Toilet Key Anthology and the “Stink Ape Resurrection Primer.” They hace an MFA in creative writing frin Southern Illinois University.