Dear Dorothy,
I hope Kansas is treating you as well as, well, Kansas can, I suppose.
I wonder what it was like for you to return. Because despite spending ten years in Oz, I think the magic I was looking for was to be found at home after all.
During my 10 years away, I spent 6 of them married to the Wicked Warlock of the West. When he flew off with the winged monkey he was having an affair with, I was left brainless, heartless and cowardly. It took years to pull every bit of hay from my skull, to lift my tail up from between my legs, but I left my chest empty and made of tin- it was better that way.
And that’s how I intended to stay, but then one day, I met a disco ball. A bold light that reached every corner of the dark in glittering glam, he ruled each room he stepped into and brought people together around him. Bend is Oz to his Oklahoma, and his yellow brick road led him to me, just as mine did to him. He was so perfect, he’d put even Glinda the Good Witch to shame. We would have been made for each other, if only I had a heart.
As I look back, I wonder, had I been in Oz at all? Or had I been tricked by the man behind the curtain into thinking I had found the magic I was seeking? Because, as I turned back around, I think I found it right here where the ruby slippers left me.
No longer shadowed by the perpetual overcast of Oz, I now stood, surrounded by the queer friends I had spent my whole life looking for. Who would have guessed, Dorothy, that my life would change in a karaoke bar. The very bar in fact, that I first found myself caught in the dazzling show of my disco ball. I found the magic I had been seeking the night I met him there as he extended something ticking in his hand to me.
As our yellow brick roads become one on this journey, I wonder if Oz is a place at all, or a time in your life where you strive to find magic. It’s a question I will continue to ponder in the quiet moments walking alongside my disco ball, the only sound in the air between us the ticking of the heart shaped clock that he placed in my empty tin chest.
Forever Yours,
A Friend of Dorothy
