Wish You Wore Here
By Mary Hill Ross
It is strange, this feeling that we should be somewhere else...
We scroll past our own lives in search of another one. A secret beach somewhere, a square-donut shop, a cherry-blossom tunnel perfectly timed. The quiet suggestion is that this here is not enough. But what if we keep traveling farther while something closer goes unseen?
City Exclusives quietly reverse this longing. They leave home so we don’t have to. For a moment, we belong to another city entirely. The room widens, slowly, without warning. No suitcase. Only borrowed air. Then the day resumes: the kettle hums. We stand, altered—just enough to notice. Home feels newly itself. We smell like someone elsewhere.
Perhaps it is not leaving we long for, only a quiet invitation to look closer. What we seek faraway may just be a way of seeing here as if for the first time.
We stay. The room stays. And something small, irrevocable has shifted.
