"I really did fucker."

The traces of people tell us what it is like. What it was like. What it will be like. In May 2007 I flew from New York to Memphis. I was assigned a three day magazine shoot in Oxford, Mississippi, with the rock band – aswell as my fellow Swedes – The Hives. The journalist Håkan Steen picked me up in a rental car at Memphis International Airport. A couple of miles south on Route 55 my mobile phone stops working. We find our way to a T-Mobile store in Southaven, in the outer Memphis area. The store owner slash technician states that my phone is completely dead. My heart races. But the guy has a few spare parts, since he a while ago had disassembled a phone of the same model. So he replaces the circuit board in my phone. And – it works. We're back on Route 55, and I browse through my phone. I realise there are a lot of text messages in my inbox, messages that I don't recognize. I must have inherited them from the former owner of the circuit board. They were not meant for me. These are messages that Someone Else has recieved to his or her inbox. For five years I treasured this glimpse of Someone Else's life before putting it in front of my camera. Someone in the Memphis area, who once had the same phone model and the same phone operator as me. Someone with other friends, and with a completely different life.