He was born on an ordinary afternoon in an ordinary hospital, to two ordinary parents who loved each other in the quiet, practical way most couples do. There were no omens. No storms. No unusual silence in the sky.
Just a baby crying like every other baby in the world.
He grew the way children do.
He learned to walk on a tiled floor scratched by years of furniture being dragged. He fell, cried, stood up again. His mother clapped. His father recorded a blurry video. Nothing remarkable.
He went to school with a bag slightly too big for his shoulders. He hated math, loved stories, scraped his knees, lied about homework, laughed too loud with friends. He was neither the smartest nor the slowest. Neither the strongest nor the weakest.
Just somewhere in the middle.
He grew taller.
His voice cracked awkwardly in class once, and everyone laughed. He pretended not to care. He liked a girl who never noticed him. He fought once, apologized later. He dreamed big dreams at night and forgot most of them by morning.
Exams. Birthdays. Festivals. Arguments. Apologies. Summer heat. Winter fog.
Life moved the way it moves for millions of boys across the world — steady, repetitive, predictable.
He became a man before he realized it had happened.
One evening, as the sun melted orange into the horizon, he was walking back home with his friends along the usual dirt path that cut through the valley near their town. They joked about nothing important. About cricket scores. About teachers. About who would succeed first.
Somewhere along the path, he slowed down.
Not because he was tired.
Just because something felt… different.
His friends kept walking ahead, their laughter fading with distance. He looked up.
And there it was.
A door.
Standing upright in the middle of the valley.
No walls. No frame attached to anything. Just a simple wooden door, slightly worn, as if it had been waiting a very long time.
The wind moved through the grass normally. Birds still flew. The world did not react.
He glanced ahead. His friends hadn't noticed. They kept walking.
He stepped closer.
His heart didn't race. He didn't feel fear. Just curiosity — the quiet, ordinary kind.
He reached out.
The handle was cool.
He turned it.
The door opened easily.
On the other side was not the valley.
It was a vast grass field stretching endlessly beneath a wide, impossibly blue sky. The air felt lighter. The light softer. The world quieter.
He stepped through.
The door clicked shut behind him.
He turned around.
There was no door.
No valley.
No path.
Only the endless field swaying gently under a sky that felt too large.
He stood there, an average man from an average world, in a place that did not seem to belong to averages.
And for the first time in his entirely ordinary life…
Nothing felt ordinary anymore.