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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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Busted.
We’d just finished brushing our teeth in Todd’s bathroom when he caught me in the mirror. Caught me sneering at the empty Yoo-hoo bottle near the sink, its cheerful yellow label a taunt.
“You don't like anything I like,” he accused me with his toothbrush. “Football. Battlestar Galactica. Yoo-hoo.”
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I don’t think Jordan started out with a battle plan. But, by the time we lived together, their troops were in action in a war I didn’t even know had been declared. I didn’t have time to grab a white handkerchief, or a tissue, or my Abercrombie & Fitch tank top tinged by age. I’m sure the red flags were all there in hindsight, but I try not to assign blame to myself for not seeing the signs—for not noticing that slowly, the person I once loved was abusing me. They attacked in a three-step plan, systematically stripping away the fundamental trust I had in myself I had clawed myself into having.
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The majority of my childhood family backpacking trips occurred in New England. My father’s deep love of the wilderness initiated these excursions, but the whole family came to love how trees and natural waterways calmed us. Making such a journey with four small children was a tall order. In exchange for the extra effort involved for such trips—my mom was already working her ass off at home—my parents negotiated for my dad to be in charge of planning, packing, and cooking. Summer after summer, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, we set forth: to the Catskills, the White Mountains, and the Adirondacks—my dad’s pack piled higher than the top of his head and my mom’s not much shorter. If there were any tension around these trips, my parents kept it to themselves, and naturally I was eager to make similar forays once I reached adulthood myself.
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Would you feel differently about me if I wanted to have children?
His pause told me everything; before he could parse out, I think so? I knew. It was more telling than the way he’d wheezed, I'm excited to see you too, dread of my visit dripping from his voice. In less than a week, I was supposed to fly out for a long weekend together. We’d been dating long distance for six months and everything seemed to be going well. He mentioned via text the previous night that he’d call to explain his ‘situation’ in the morning. I’d understood his situation as ‘needing a ride to the dentist’ while I was in town; he’d just received the bad luck news of an impending root canal. I didn’t anticipate his ‘situation’ would entail phrases such as my love has plateaued and I just need to rip off the Band-Aid.
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On my study’s display shelf devoted to cherished objects stands a miniature porcelain Dutch clog from Delft. HOLLAND it proclaims above a hand-painted image of a windmill and house by a river, small waves brought to life by slashes of cobalt glaze applied by a skilled hand.
At first, I wonder if this is a memento from a trip to the Netherlands, homeland of my maternal grandfather. My cousin sends me photographs of other Delft blue and white porcelain brought from Zeeland by our great-grandmother and given to her mother, my aunt: a set of two canisters, a platter, a dairymaid statuette. I fantasize that this clog creates a connection between me and relatives I’ve never met. I want this heirloom to show me how I belong to this family, and it does, but not in the way I expect.
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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.
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On 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.
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I asked myself, how do I get into these things? How did I find myself in the middle of a desert, with nothing but a gas station for over a hundred miles, in the searing heat toting a backpack that magically gained weight the further I went?
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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.
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The 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.
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“Nature’s the ultimate inspiration.”
The woman speaking was ageless and poised in a way that made me feel homely and naive. Her blowout looked freshly fixed, and her workout clothes looked as though she’d never actually worked out in them—a start contrast to my faded sweatpants. Her make-up was so natural I wondered if she was wearing make-up at all—but no one could look that good at 6:00 am without make-up, could they? Maybe she just had flawless skin. Maybe it is the giant jar of green juice she’s touting.
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My desk had become a fortress of pillows, snacks, and motivational sticky notes from my colleagues that read things like “You can do it!” and “Please don’t give birth on my lunch break!” The snacks were essential, as my unborn child had developed gourmet tastes that could rival a Michelin-starred chef. Pickles dipped in Nutella? Sure. Cheese puffs with a side of strawberry jam? Why not? And my chair had been replaced with an exercise ball, supposedly to help with labor prep but mostly making me feel like a circus act.
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My drivers license is about to expire and I am trying not to dwell on my recent decision to cut bangs. For the first time in two decades, I have to renew my license in-person. I pull into the Department of Motor Vehicles, I park my car and assemble the papers that sit on the passenger seat. I am optimistic and photo ready. I go inside and get in line. I am here, I tell the clerk at the check-in desk, to get a Real ID.
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I thought he was masquerading, even though it was morning and too early for a costume. In my mind, I wondered if he had dressed up the night before, if he went to a costume party where he decided to don the clothes of a cowboy. The bandana looked like he recently pulled it from being wrapped around his neck to cover his nose and mouth, to make him only partially recognizable. It was the early eighties after all, and Village People costumes, the policeman, the construction worker, and the cowboy were still the rage. The thought of this made me want to laugh, to think that this guy hadn't been home since he dressed like the cowboy in the Village People, on his way home from wherever he had spent the night and wanted to pick up a pack of cigarettes.
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Dear Aspiring Dancer,
Thank you for auditioning to be in the Nutcracker; we can tell just how far this was out of your comfort zone. We appreciate that when you dance, your arms flail all over the place like palm trees during a Category 5 Hurricane, you maintain a comical lack of flexibility even after four years of attempting to be anything but a human tree branch, and you will not stop talking to your neighbor about the movie Enchanted, no matter how loud we play Tchaikovsky as a sign to tell you to shut up.
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Throughout a long and rewarding business career, I have often been asked, How did you get into public relations? Well, it’s kind of a funny story. Or it is now. Today, I can laugh at the litany of misadventures that characterized my first step into the job market. But for years, that innocuous question would hurl me into a flashback traumatic by a young person’s standards.
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On the day after Thanksgiving 2022, I dragged my husband to a thrift shop outside Boston to look for a book I'd donated nearly twenty years ago. It started as a Twitter dare the week before. I was chatting with some pals about a book an ex-boyfriend gave me when I was twenty and we were at the height of a love affair that lasted seven years. My ex died in February, and I was having a hard time talking about it; most people didn't seem to understand why I was so upset about the death of a guy I broke up with so long ago. The easiest thing to do, sometimes, was to play it for laughs; at least that way I got to talk about it a little, with strangers who didn't know me well. "Why don't you go look for it?" someone said. "You never know, and it'll be a great story if you find it."
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My mother’s eyes registered my arrival, but without her dependable smile. The bones of her face were sharp and craggy, her nose slightly humped from a childhood fall, her eyes blue and deeply set. Tita, who cared for her, had dressed her in her brightest blouse and hung a necklace round her neck. Mom was crooked in her chair and not pretending, while a cheerful string of rainbow-colored letters on the mantle shouted happy birthday for her eighty-ninth and last.
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“Dear Poo, I’m sorry I’m writing this in a letter, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you face to face…”
We’d been in our new house just a couple of weeks when my dad—Da—left a letter and, with it, left us. He was gone. And none of us knew what gone meant. Mom couldn’t tell me where he went or why. She called Grandma to try to decipher his note. Whatever sense they made of it wasn’t shared.
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When my ex-husband told me his father was dead, he said it casually. The way you'd mention an alma mater, or that you'd lived abroad for a while.
"My dad died five years ago," he said. We were at work, in a courtroom with no privacy, dressed in our lawyer suits. He reached down to tug up his socks when he said it. I remember searching for significance in how he announced his tragedy while adjusting his outfit. It made me wonder if his father's death was an easy thing to bear. Or if it were so painful he needed to reveal it in the bright bustle of a courtroom, with busied hands. He usually seemed so guarded.
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