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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When Weezie came to pick me up for our road trip to the mountains, six months after her husband Emmanuel was diagnosed, she looked excited. But it felt forced, like a child who no longer believes in Santa but pretends to believe so they may feel the old tingle of anticipation. What I saw was grief.
Read MoreOn a clear late summer afternoon along North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Sandbar slid off its foundation and washed into the Atlantic Ocean, the footage so dramatic, it went viral on social media and made the national news. The house was now called Dolphin’s Point, but for my friends and me, it would always be Sandbar. I thought about how the owners must have felt watching something they loved drift away from them, as they stood helpless, knowing they would never see it again.
Read MoreThe sun set an hour ago, which means it’s finally below forty degrees Celsius. Normally I embrace the dry heat in Erbil in exchange for the humidity back home in Toronto, but today it leaves my throat dry and hoarse. I shuffle my feet on the dusty tiles outside my house and peer over the metal gate until Emmita’s black SUV pulls up.
Read MoreI’ve never seen the rooster next door that crows at dawn. And during thunderstorms. And during the ubiquitous fireworks—this is Oaxaca, after all. In the afternoon, when he’s tired of scratching at the same dirt hoping to find something different, but it’s just the same fucking dirt, he crows a little louder.
“I hear you,” I whisper over the fifteen-foot wall that separates us. “I feel you.”
Read MoreHe had been in Montana for seven days before she got there. He was there with a group of guys—one he had grown up with, the others he had fished with before, on the same river. The house was up on a mesa and they had rented it for ten days. It was her first time in Montana, her first trip away from her children in over a year. She didn’t do any of the planning, but rather showed up feeling as if she was joining in on someone else’s vacation.
Read More“Let’s see what your fortune holds,” my sister Lynn said, brandishing a pack of tarot cards.
A recent college graduate, I was off to France to spend a year as an au pair. She laid out the cards carefully—we were just messing around; neither of us really believed it—and put on a good show. Lynn explained each card with gravitas, knowing nods and occasional sighs. I don’t remember what card came—the naked Star? The Wheel of Fortune?—when her eyebrows jumped up to her hairline and she announced “You will come home pregnant.”
Read MoreAugust 1973. I had graduated from high school two months earlier and was in Potamia, my hometown in Cyprus, for the summer. Life in Potamia was hard and uncomfortable, and I had never really liked being there. My father was a farmer, and my parents had to work long hours every day on our farm to make ends meet. When we were in Potamia, my brothers and sisters worked at the farm as well. For most of the year, we, the eldest three of the five siblings, attended secondary school in Nicosia (the capital of Cyprus), where we lived with our grandparents.
Read MoreThe road unfolds in front of us, a black ribbon of tarmac glittering in the summer heat. It is one of many roads I have taken. The rearview mirror reflects the same view, a yellow dotted line that connects us to the next destination, and the previous. Were we ever there? Over a hill, the road disappears, and I wonder if we too will disappear as we follow it.
Read MoreMy pale, Nordic friend, Dahlia, arrives on the station platform in Goa in late afternoon. We embrace each other in the brilliant sun, surprised to see each other in this place. I hold her trim, wiry body tight against me, surprised she’s really here.
Read MoreAfter we dated for a few months, Miguel told me that when he saw me for the first time he immediately thought, “I hope she’s single and speaks Czech.” Only one was true.
Read MoreI know many things, some of them untrue:
By 2050, the southern half of Vietnam could all but disappear under the high tide of the South China Sea.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail is a popular hiking destination.
Vietnam is longer than Chile and has a greater population.
“Hi, I’m Bunny, how are you?” she said. Her name caught my attention. “Bunny” is “an informal name of a rabbit, especially a small, young one” in the dictionary. I looked it up; those days, I carried a pocket size English dictionary with me.
Read MoreAs I’ve grown, so has my desire to see, taste, and experience the world. An unquenchable thirst for encountering newness, you could say.
I’ve become a travelling woman.
Not that I often traverse great distances or see far-off places or spend much money to do so. On the contrary, my glorious little life has led me to find ways of travelling right where I am.
Read MoreBecause of threats and incidents of terrorism, few Americans were traveling in Europe during the summer of 1986. In spite of that, for reasons not relevant here, my husband and I decided to take a trip to Turkey by way of train from Vienna to Istanbul.
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The beauty of traveling is that eventually we no longer need to go anywhere to get the experience that traveling once afforded us. Traveling is just a path or a launching pad to show us what's possible. It's the first glimpse of what it's like to truly "wake up".
Read MoreI didn’t grow up with a family that had much interest in extensive traveling. My mom says its because we’re farmers, and all we know is to stay in one place. She took me and my brother to Disneyland in California when I was in sixth grade, and we’ve talked about going to Ireland one day since it’s where our ancestors originated, but there just hasn’t been a good time so far. My dad’s side was a little more restless, but it was mostly repeated trips with my grandparents to Pigeon Forge or to a beach in Florida or South Carolina. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining; I’m extremely grateful for those trips and the time I got to spend with my family, but at the same time, I ached to experience something beyond the sand.
Read MoreIt was a quaint little place, one room in the front of a house, lined with old shelves in chipping paint, books squeezed in wherever there was space. In the corner stood a tiny wooden table with a few flowers in a small vase, sitting atop a stack of novels and old Turkish newspapers.
Read MoreI walked for an hour with no destination in mind. I stood atop the grassy dam that holds the sea back from flooding the small town of Den Helder, Holland. I was nearing the end of a two-month solo backpacking trip around Europe in 2010. I decided to go as far north as I could on the train and the train brought me to Den Helder.
Read MoreThe phrase, “frozen with fear” keeps running through my brain, like those tickers on Wall Street. You know the ones, the red and green ones that tell all the stock brokers how much the economy is tanking? Those ones. Only this one, the one in my brain, is saying “frozen with fear.”
Over and over again.
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