Ozurie"oz-you-ree" or "ozh-uh-ree"

n. Feeling torn between the life you want and the life you have. Consider Dorothy at the end of the movie, whispering "There's no place like home" while Oz still fades from her eyes. She chose to return, a confirmed Kansan now. Yet she carries an unshakable awareness—that her gray dress is secretly blue, that the sky catches fire at sunset.

She knows this humdrum world can explode without warning, blooming with color and chaos. She alone senses the shimmer of gold on the gray gravel road. To her, Oz is more than a dream—it's a sickness that makes normal life feel intolerable.

Life is not a flat outpost, and it's not a bangarang wonderland either. Maybe they're just two ways of looking at some ambiguous middle place. Some days you wake up in Kansas, some days in Oz. Do you plunge into a Technicolor riot of what might be? Or accept the humble beauty of ordinary life? Black slippers or ruby? Until she decides, she'll be caught in maddening tension, her auburn hair slowly turning gray.