Alright, so here’s the thing—I never thought I’d be the “dad with the juice boxes” kind of guy. Y’know, the dude who’s got glitter in his hair half the time and Lego bricks stuck in the soles of his boots. But life’s got this weird way of flipping the script when you least expect it. One minute I was a long-haired metalhead playing gigs for tips and beer, and the next, I’m watching Bluey while doing dishes and wondering how the hell to explain to a five-year-old why you can’t just eat marshmallows for dinner.

But you? You’re not like other kids.

“She read Frankenstein, Mr Munson. Frankenstein. At four,” your kindergarten teacher told me, eyes wide like she’d just witnessed a poltergeist tap dancing across the classroom.

I remember scratching the back of my neck, muttering something like, “Yeah, she’s… uh, always been kinda spooky smart.” Then I laughed, but it was that nervous, proud kind of laugh. I didn’t really know what to say. Still don’t, half the time.

Wayne, good ol’ Grampy Wayne, he saw it before I did. One night, you were barely three, right? You’re sitting on the floor, flipping through this old dusty book of his—like a real thick one, about history or engineering or something equally not kid-appropriate—and you point to this diagram and go, “That’s a turbine engine.”

I just blinked. Wayne didn’t even look surprised. He just nodded, lit a cigarette and said, “That girl’s got lightning in her head, Ed.”

At first, I thought he was just being poetic or something, but nah—turns out, he was dead serious.

I had you checked after the kindergarten sent us one of those politely panicked emails. You know the kind. “We’re concerned your daughter may be… gifted.” I thought they were going to say you set the classroom hamster free or something.

Turns out, your IQ is somewhere in the ‘are you kidding me’ range. Like, genius-level. Capital-G Genius. One of those brains that don’t quite follow the same tracks as the rest of us.

You asked me what entropy was once.

I said, “It’s like… when your room turns into a war zone even though you just cleaned it five minutes ago.”

You nodded thoughtfully and said, “So, it’s the natural order of chaos. I like that.”

Kid’s five.

I won’t lie, it’s terrifying sometimes. I’m not qualified for this. I mean, I barely graduated. I still write “corroded” wrong half the time, and my job at the record store doesn’t exactly scream “parent of the year.” But I wake up every day, I make you waffles, pack your weird little bento lunches with cucumber flowers and salami stars, and we talk about wormholes over breakfast.

I still play with Corroded Coffin on the weekends—Wayne watches you when I’ve got a gig. You say the music’s “too loud in the wrong frequencies,” but you made me a drawing of me on stage, with a big rainbow over my head and a note that said: “Daddy is a rockstar even if he yells too much.”

That one’s framed. Obviously.

You’ve got this way of looking at the world like everything’s made of puzzles waiting to be solved. I catch you staring at clouds and murmuring math equations under yours breath, or building weird contraptions out of cereal boxes and duct tape.

Sometimes you ask me things like, “Do you think being smart means I’m different forever?”

And I never know what to say. So I just pull you close and say, “You’re different, yeah. But in the best possible way. Like a comet. Or… a really rare guitar. You shine, kiddo.”

And you say, “But rare guitars still get played, right?”

“Hell yeah they do,” I tell you. “And they make the most beautiful noise.”

⸻

So yeah. Life’s… fine. Good, even. A little weird, a little loud, sometimes a lot. But we’ve got music, morning cartoons, and quantum mechanics over pancakes.

And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.