The Monthly Theme Essays are a collection of essays written each month on a predetermined theme. These essays are always published during the last week of the month. To submit a Monthly Theme Essay check out our upcoming themes.
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Is it possible to feel the loss of something if you never had it to begin with? I don’t mean desire, because to desire something doesn’t necessarily mean a palpable sense of missing it. I mean, rather, to feel a defined and tangible absence, like that of a phantom limb, but for one never possessed in the first place.
Read MoreWhen I returned to Tehran for the first time, twenty years after my family’s escape from the Islamic Theocracy, I was in love. I can’t write an exhaustive list of what I was in love with, because I was in love with everything. I was in love with the taxi drivers. The surly ones. The quiet ones. The inquisitive.
Read MoreI pulled the glass door toward me and walked into the Cord Camera store. The Man sat across from the entrance, on the other side of a glass display filled with shelves of Minolta and Canon SLR cameras. He read the newspaper and his pasty, distended arms looked like alabaster bookends holding the news captive.
Read More"You're not very gracious, are you?" he said, flashing a wry smile from his perch near the ultrasound monitor, next to the exam table on which I lay. I felt a pang; I don't like to think of myself as ungrateful. I hadn't shown much appreciation when he declared that the wound from a biopsy performed a few months earlier had healed well, that everything looked fine, and that I could now go a whole eight months, as opposed to six, or three, before my next round of precautionary imaging.
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