I'm twenty-three years old and I've never seen daylight, or flowers, or smiles. I had never thought to wonder about it until the day I looked through the window.

It was a dark night, and cold, like the stabbing of knives. That's not such a surprise, though. It's always dark here - ceaseless, never ending night.

I was walking home and I took a shortcut through a field. The grass was bleached almost white from lack of sun. How anything managed to grow here I wasn't sure, but it did. I saw something a little ways off, a couple hundred feet or so, that I'd never before seen in my hundreds of jaunts through this field. As I got closer it began to take an oblong, rectangular shape. It was a door, a brown one with a glass paned window at the top.

I walked up to it and looked curiously around. It was standing, supporting itself in the middle of this lonesome, desolate field. Then I noticed something quite peculiar. On either side of, and behind the door was the same, normal view of the dreary, rainy world I lived in - but through the window I saw something spectacular.

It was the ocean. The brilliant sun was shining down on it and the water glimmered and sparkled in the light, beckoning me to run through the clean, white sand and jump in the cool waves. I felt I could almost hear them crashing on the shore.

There was a cliff off to the side on top of which stood a magnificent two-story house, white with dark green trim. You don't see anything like that around here.

Do you know what surrounded the house? Grass. There was a clean-cut lawn of lush, green, healthy grass. I don't think I've ever seen green grass, not even in a picture. Our paints come in varying shades of black, gray, and white, but not green.

Peppering the grass every few feet were flowers in all colors imaginable. I couldn't even name half of them. It was absolutely stunning. Colors nonexistent in our world are programmed into us from birth. I don't know why. I never thought I'd ever see anything like this.

Then a bell chimed from somewhere in my pocket, sharply bringing me back to reality. I was late. "Dinner must be ready by now," I thought. With a great strength of will I tore myself away from the strange object I had found.

For a week or so after that I came back every night, absorbing all I could of that colorful, bright world. The house on the cliff looked deserted. No one ever came in, no one ever went out. It's as if it was meant for me.

After that first week the door appeared to be less substantial every night. The edges grew fuzzy and the picture became less and less clear until one day it was almost completely gone. Only the door handle remained. "This is it," I thought, "It really is."

I gathered my courage and opened the door.