The traces of people tell us what it’s like. What it was like. What it’ll be like.

May 2007. The flight took me from my home in New York to Memphis International Airport. Picked up by a journalist in a rental car. Interstate 55, southbound. My cell phone doesn’t start up. No sign of life. Anxiety comes crawling. We find a T-Mobile store in the southern outskirts of Memphis.

Maybe we’ve left Tennessee.

It’s the circuit board. Completely dead. From somewhere and nowhere the man in the store takes out a box with spare parts. Left-over circuit boards. Abandoned circuit boards. My phone is transplanted with one of them. The tiny display lights up in blue. My contacts are still there. The ease chases the anxiety away, thank you so much, and we’re off.

Further south on I-55 I find them. They just lay there, all quiet. A bunch of unfamiliar text messages in my phone. Messages dated from the previous fall, messages from different phone numbers, only incoming messages, no outgoing. Who sent these? Slowly I get it – I’ve inherited messages from the former owner of the circuit board. Messages never meant for me, messages that now fill my phone with fragments of a life I don’t know whose it is, whose it was.

I don’t erase them.

For years I treasure the glimpses of the life of the other person. The person from the Memphis area, the person who isn’t me. Finally I perpetuate the messages and let the pieces from another life land on photographic paper and regain the importance they may have had once, for someone else. The significance they’ve gained for me.

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Honorable Mention, International Photography Awards 2012