jesse – Page 2 – Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin

Atrocity

Once upon a time, the boy in ripped blue pajamas asked his mother to tell him a story of lions, tigers, and bears. He sat straight up in his car-shaped bed and pulled the covers to his chin, his heart fast with excitement. He loved his mother’s stories and the way they made him feel. […]

Boys at Play

Within the walled neighbourhood of Intramuros, a picturesque living museum of the Spanish colonial period in Filipino history, the taxi finally stops in front of your hotel, and you hand the driver his money, an amount four times what your guidebook has informed you is standard. The driver flips through his bills, pausing every now […]

Grey

1997 On a Lake Huron beach, close to Southampton, Ontario, a yellow catamaran sits in the sands. Today, no mainsail hangs from the spar. Where the staysail should ripple from the wind shines only the sun in a blue sky. The black rudder stays dry and dirty. Yet behind it, underneath the deck, among […]

Taiwan on the Eve of COVID-19

Until 2006, Taoyuan International Airport had been called Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, after the great nationalist leader. A military man his entire life, Kai-shek first grew to prominence fighting in the 1911 revolution, in which the nationalists defeated the Qing dynasty and transformed imperial China into a republic. He then joined the Nationalist Party, or […]

Sipping Lattes in Beirut

In the 1960s and 1970s, Hamra Street was to Beirut what the Champs d’elysee is to Paris. It was the place to be, glamour writ large. Movie houses and theatres stood alongside shops selling the most luxurious international brands. Famous folks flocked to Hamra Street—movie stars, artists, and intellectuals all had their favourite spot to […]

On Whiteness and Dreadlocks

I remember the first time the thought of dreadlocks crossed my mind. It was 2002, and I was seventeen and running along our concession road deep in rural Ontario at the start of October. The colours of the maples and birches were fire; the sky was as grey as elephant skin. And then it happened: […]

Zombie

Krakow’s medieval central square, Rynek Główny, does not look much different than it did when I first visited six years earlier, in the summer of 2016. I joined the other tourists who sipped Zywiec under patio umbrellas and fell under the spell of the square’s endless movement, the ebb and flow of people in motion. […]

Stealing Photos

I take photographs. Some I take because a certain sight strikes me as visually arresting, an arrangement that would make an interesting composition. Some I take so I can simply remember the details of a place—the colours, the textures, the objects—so when I look back on it, I have evidence of how things were. This […]

Santa in Syria

Damascus is full of holiday cheer the day I visit in December. Despite being a majority Muslim country, Christians still occupy a large portion of the country’s religious, and they have reminded everyone that even though Syria perpetually exists on the brink—what with the power outages, unemployment, the unaffordability of fuel, and the unhealed […]

Author: jesse