by It was as normal a day as any. I was hanging around my apartment when I got a call from my little brother asking if he could stop by. The sun peered through the cracked windows of my living room. The smell of sage lingered after I burned some incense, and every so often a bird would fly by and remind me just how much I loved this season.
I heard the little bells ring on the door, signaling my brother had arrived.
The creaks of the floorboards announced his every step. Old houses are full of so much candor, unable to hide anything or anyone stirring about.
“Knock knock.” He tapped his knuckle against the already open door to announce himself.
“Hey, loser. Come on in.”
I had moved out of my parents’ house so we saw much less of one another. When we were in each other’s company again, there was always catching up to do.
In this aimless chatter, we found ourselves reminiscing about our childhood.
“How is the house without me in it, anyway? Lonely and unbearable?”
“A bit, yeah,” he admitted, to my surprise. “Mostly, just boring.”
I pictured him sitting in his room by himself. Our rooms bordered one another in the layout of our childhood home. A flash of him standing outside my door carved its way into my imagination. A pit formed in my stomach. It was sour enough to feel regrettable, and deep enough to know that it was going to stick with me.
“Oh my gosh, are you crying?” He took note of my glossy eyes.
“Just a little.” I laughed and sniffled. “I’m just realizing that I hardly ever knocked at your door, yet you always knocked at mine.”
His face softened. “It’s okay.” He was half concerned and half finding this all very humorous.
“Yeah, but…now that I think about it, there were so many times when you knocked on my door and I was so mean to you.”
I recalled being an angsty teen and having my kid brother knock at my door. Sometimes he would be met with an aggressive ‘What?!’ or even ‘What do you want?!’. There were even times where I feigned being asleep just to continue rotting in peace. I remembered his shadowed feet under the crack of the door, lingering a bit, before finally shuffling away.
“It’s fine. I knocked on your door like ten times a day. That would’ve annoyed me, too.”
“I know. I guess I’m just sentimental because we probably won’t live with each other again.”
“That’s just the way of life.” He smiled. He had become such a grown and wise person in the short time I’d been out of the house.“Some people are closed door people. And some are…” He trailed off, thinking of a word.
“Knockers?”
He laughed heartily, and I joined in a second after, realizing how carelessly I threw around an innuendo. “Not like boobs.” I snorted.
“It’s perfect.”
And so it was.
The theory materialized. We declared that closed door people were the ones that hardly ever reached out. They were the ones that kept to themselves. Rarely the first to call or text. They might think of you often, but they are content with holding space in their mind for you to live in warmly and contently, all without you having much of a clue. They genuinely care, their expression is often just less than their full passion when distanced from someone. Their affection is considered so sacred that they keep it warmed up inside themselves, hardly even aware that they haven’t released it. They put their full faith in you knowing, because they know it undoubtedly, so they feel it’ll carry no matter if it’s outrightly expressed.
Then, there are the knockers. These are the ones who are the initiators in the relationship dynamic. They reach out first. They make the plans. They are effortlessly and quite shamelessly letting you know how often they are thinking of you. The communicators and the glue.
This went beyond the standard mechanics of being an extrovert or introvert, as well. I had always been more of the extroverted one out of the two of us, with him leaning more toward the “hermit” side of the spectrum, in our childhood. Yet still, we reached the conclusion that I was more of a closed door person, and he was a knocker.
“Yeah, but now that I think about it…I would always knock at Jake’s door growing up and he hardly ever knocked at mine.” I was referring to our older brother, the firstborn in the trinity of our siblinghood.
It was in this that we reached another epiphany: You can be both.
You see, flipping the script–I was a knocker to my older brother. I was to him, as my little brother was to me. Knocking at his door. Asking to play. Seeing what he was doing. All growing up, I was the little drifting leaf stumbling over the threshold of his door on a whim.
This birthed a sort of asterisked declaration to our theory.
*Most younger siblings are the knockers to older siblings.
There might be outlying relationships that differ from your core pattern.
So with this little theory, I ask:
Who are you? Are you the person to go knock at your friend’s door first? Do most people come to your dorm or do you show up to theirs? Do you make the plans or do the plans find you?
When two closed doors meet, it’s harder to maintain a friendship. When two knockers meet, it might feel like an overstimulating exchange of chaos, never a moment for a restful recharge.
But a closed door and a knocker? The. Perfect. Match.
That pair tends to thrive.
Every closed door needs a knocker in their life.
Can you think of who yours might be?
If you’re a knocker, I am sure you’re already on your way to sharing this to them, and if you’re a closed door, go knock on your knocker’s door for a change.
