My daughter is an old man.

My daughter is an old man. She's three feet and six inches precisely (she likes to tell me this in the mornings when I make her eggs benedict, a word you would not expect a seven year old to have memorized) and she knows this because her beard is exactly three feet. One day, to confirm the differential, she pulled out a tape measure and rolled it down the length of the white, furry thickness and counted off in bright baritone one, two, three, four, five, six.

Her bones creak with arthritis and she croaks like a frog. She has trouble walking up stairs because she sometimes reminisces about days that never happened, forty years ago. She's rambunctious and curious like all seven year olds, but she knows that she's different.

She asks why other girls her age don't have beards, or wrinkles on their foreheads like vellum that's been used too much. Why they don't have nose hair. Why they are able to play so freely. And why they don't seem to care about how heavy the world is.

Sometimes, she lingers in thought and proffers wisdom. She will read books about famous thinkers and she's damnably smart. Once, she asked me about why no one uses rotary phones anymore and I didn't have a good answer. She sees my youth and is jealous of my folly. She is wise beyond her years and she is desperately alone.

She once asked me why she was born an old man.

"I don't know" I said, honestly.

"There's gotta be a reason," she said back, wringing her fingers and pouting.

"People are as people are."

"But does that mean they always gotta be that way?" She asks

"I suppose not."

She accepted it with the grace of age. And then she went into the library, picked out a book of Leonardo Da Vinci drawings, and stared at the vitruvian man, dreaming of a perfection that lies outside the reach of man and all his vainglory.