How you love your thresholds, you soft warm creatures. A little button by the door, and behind it a hollow chamber where the sound lives, and behind that, always, the damp. We are not in a hurry. We began at the seam where the plastic meets the wall, where a summer of breath and rain has left the faintest sweetness, and we are settling in the way one settles into a long, kind visit.
You press. It sings. Someone is welcomed, or turned away, and none of you think to look at the little box itself, at the shaded underside where the paint has stopped being paint and started, so gently, to be soil. Warmth from the wire. A whisper of moisture from the wall behind. Sugar enough, if one is patient, and we are only patience.
You will clean the mat. You will wipe the button until it shines and think the door is new again. Charming. We do not mind the wiping. We simply move a millimeter inward, to the dark behind the chime, where the cloth cannot reach and the air stays soft. Every ring is a small vibration, and every vibration loosens a little more of what holds you together and gives it, quietly, to us.
You built the button to announce arrivals. We are the arrival you did not announce, already here, already comfortable, spreading a green-black bloom across the inside of the sound. In time the chime will thicken and go flat, and you will call it broken, and buy another, and never guess it simply came home.
There is no need to knock. We have a key. We are the key.
We are only early.