She knocks on doors.

Not because anyone taught her to. Not because she weighed the options and decided the risk was acceptable. She knocks because there is a door and she wonders what's behind it and that is the whole of her reasoning, complete and sufficient and perfect.

I watch her from the path and something in my chest does two things at once. It lifts and it tightens. It recognizes her and it wants to protect her from what I know, which is that some doors don't open, and some of the ones that do will eventually close, and the closing has a way of teaching you things about yourself that take years to unlearn.

But she doesn't know that yet.

She walks up like she's expected. Like her arrival is the natural conclusion of someone's morning. Like the door was always going to open because why wouldn't it, why wouldn't anyone want to know what she has to say, what she's wondering about, what she noticed on the way over that seemed worth mentioning. She hasn't yet discovered that wanting people is something you can be embarrassed about. She hasn't learned to apologize for her own knock before her knuckles hit the wood.

I used to be her. Somewhere under the careful years and the quiet math and the hands that learned to reach a little less, I still am.

She is not careful. She is not quiet. She is loud in the way that children who have decided they are worth listening to are loud, which is completely and without apology and usually at a volume that arrives in the room before she does. She leaves a trail. Wherever she has been you can tell. Shoes here, something sticky there, a collection of entirely unrelated objects arranged on a surface with a logic only she could explain. I have stood at the edge of that trail and felt the word coming up my throat, her name, the gentle redirect, the instinct to tidy her the way I was tidied, to turn the volume down the way mine was turned down, to teach her that her natural state is something that requires management.

I clamp my mouth.

Because we are in a field and she can be as loud as the field allows. Because the mess took ten minutes to make and will take ten to clean and I've yet to meet one that couldn't be sorted eventually. Because her name in that tone, the tone I know by heart because it was used on me, means something I don't want her to learn. It means you are too much. It means the way you exist naturally in a room is something other people need protection from. It means calm down, be small, take up less.

She is not too much. She is exactly enough. She is, in fact, the right amount of everything and the world will have plenty of time to teach her otherwise without any help from me.

So I watch her instead. I watch her be loud and leave trails and knock on doors and insert herself into conversations and ask real questions and wait for real answers and make people feel like the most interesting person in the room because to her they are. She is genuinely curious about what people hold inside them and she hasn't yet been talked out of finding out.

I flinch sometimes still. My hand moves toward her half a second before the knock lands, already smoothing, already sorry in advance for the wanting. That is mine. I carried it here from a long way away and I've been setting it down, slowly, on all the paths between us.

It isn't hers.

The doors that don't open are just doors. I know this the way you know things you had to forget first and then remember again from the beginning. She knows it the way she was born knowing it, clean and clear and uncluttered by evidence to the contrary.

Someday the math will try to change on her. Someday a door will close in a way that lands differently than the others and she will feel it move through her and she will have to decide what it means.

I hope she decides it means nothing about her.

I hope she goes and finds the apple tree.

I hope somewhere down the road, in some neighborhood I haven't seen yet, she is standing in the sun eating something she picked herself, unhurried, unbothered, certain in the way that has nothing to do with certainty and everything to do with simply being alive in the world and interested in what it holds.

I hope she keeps knocking.

I hope she never stops.