Can your fingerprint fade.

Like a glossy photo exposed to long in the sun.

Becoming dreamlike without your presence.

A magnification of grief exposed badly.

Illuminating this death like trance.

Stands still.

As this world blurs past us.

I wave at the rushing shipping.

Hopelessly seeking your face.

25 years ago when I wrote those lines, I had no idea how prescient they would be today, or yesterday. Yesterday I tried to return to Hackney, a place I used to know well, before I got even close to where I wanted to drop a letter, I had to deal with almost 30 face blank people, yeah acquired face blindness can just overwhelm you if there are too many blanks to deal with, you just can’t register the faces. Funnily I ended up walking out with headphones blazing, sunglasses on and staring at the pavement, even a simple bus ride was a tactical withdrawal. It’s worse if I cycle. With relief I have somehow liberated one face from my memory, maybe others but I only need that one face, the others would be mostly nice to have. 24 years ago I had brain surgery but acquired face blindness surviving it. The odds were bleak so there is nothing to whine about, I am here, alive and have liberated the one face that matters, to me. Whenever there has been a close call their name is on my lips, and next time it will be with their face shining from my memory, and I know there will be a next time. At one time that face was my home. Now, I belong nowhere and as is usual to no nation, or person, which is a good place for a journalist photographer to be. Up until 4 months ago I had had to treat a six year period of my life as a wasteland, my visual memory would not allow me to register any faces from that period, to keep moving I had to hold the details and emotions of them all but with the knowledge I would not be able to see them again. It’s a kind of grief. However you can make fresh memories. So I belong nowhere, without a future but that much has almost always been the case. As I was raised far away, in a time-space that no longer exists as it once did. I have always been a gaijin, that’s Japanese for foreigner, and never knew what future there was.

Gaijin. Foreigner.

I was born in Britain but have never belonged here, I had no childhood here, and although relatives died defending the country or blown up at home, the end result is an Australian sounding geezer who doesn’t sound Australian enough to an Aussie. It’s a weird feeling when you are more comfy almost anywhere but the country of your birth, alienating to be honest, being now regularly told someone is going to contact immigration about me is hysterical, to be honest I don’t even bother correcting them anymore, although I wonder if immigration UK has a file on me. I don’t belong anywhere but definitely not here anymore. I don’t want to be here anymore, I don’t want to do this anymore. I have been waking up thinking that for over 6 months now. Yeti hunting would make more sense to me than most of what I am covering now, if the journalists fling a bit more polarity into it, my need to focus the camera on reality may be in jeopardy of capsizing. I think I need to be a proper gaijin somewhere else and that is probably Japan, although there are other options as it is a fairly big planet, from my relative position in it. However I really like Japan, I really feel my inner Gaijin singing to me whenever I am there. My inner Gaijin was out to lunch on a good day 15 years or more ago, as a brain physically heals, it feels like you are a none constant variable in your own head, a Super Gaijin who is alien even to the themselves, the multiple themselves kind of illustrates the point I am making, if I was using a gaming meme then this would be Gaijin legendary level. I did almost a decade like that. All you can do is hold on and focus on the now, as the mind shifts everything else around you. Somewhere in the fix I lost the faces. Became a ghost to myself, the Japanese for ghost is Obake.

Obake. Ghost.

Over the last three/four months many visual memories have rapidly returned, any amnesia creates a ghost, the remembering experience was almost psychotic, memories of voices and conversations ricocheted through my head, loss and more loss, the fading of relevance that was felt surged loudly, but with it the reality of love, death and a singular point of happiness came. I have always felt that love and the loss that followed. Four years worth of life’s visuals returned, I felt shaky and on more occasions than I can take seriously, I was twitching. I find it funny now but at the time I thought my last marble had been lost. I need that marble, it’s mine. I can now replay my Sons birth, finally see it and finally see Go Go Girl in my mind again. Without shame I will say the word love here, I do miss her and even though we became a mutual disaster, I miss it. That is a truth. I would love to go and take photos together even if I had to prop her up. The weirdest part is that elements of my personality came to the forefront through this, let’s face it when the shit hits the fan I am always the first to laugh. When it comes down to it I know more about shit fanning than is healthy but I am an ink for blood photojournalist, so it’s a professional requirement. To find myself enjoying things more is normality returning, plus I am concluding that the two years after the surgery which are a total freaking blank can happily be forgotten completely, forever, infinitely, and did not happen at all as far as I am concerned, I don’t know, I don’t care, and I am not even curious. Personality is a latent thing that can be effected by any number of elements, most of which do not involve brain surgery, I can say that as I have experienced many things that have change my personality and point of view, (please translate POV literally.) but I am back, I am alive, I really shouldn’t be, (yet again.) So Obake makes sense to me from where I am. Which is ghost.

Gaijin Obake. Foreigner Ghost.

When you wake from a bad dream you could feel relief, happy to be awake, but what if you are in a bad place? If you are unhappy a bad dream could be an upper not a downer, if you are waking up to someone abusive or that you can’t stand then that is the nightmare, not the bad dreams fault. I am sitting in a two bed Edwardian flat as I type this, my living room is bigger than a friend of mines flat is. I live alone, I should be waking up happy, not neutral, yet I would trade it for a tiny place far away in Hokkaido or PNG or Managua or or or, and the reason for that is that I have absolutely no bone too chew here, seriously if the UK wants to follow Reform into a racist Trumpesque abyss or if the Govt wants to restrict another freedom, I am done with it, I have lost every battle in the UK, it’s a place of complacent conformity that just makes me long for another bout of brain surgery. So talking of the good old days, days when I could not write as myself and had to dissociate to stevesevilempire to write anything, as my brain was at that time surgically damaged, and talking of now, today, well right now I have to burn this all down. Also considering that I knew the words Obake Gaijin when I was five, it has a degree of familiarity with myself that fits perfectly. Even my son has had the sense to go to live in Melbourne, and I have only one reason to be here, one. Only one person could stop me leaving, but this stevesevilempire lark and a lot of what I have built here in he UK has to burn down, be destroyed, crushed and gone. Every word written has truth to it, but I have no further wish to be this. In an effort more to reconnect with myself I went back to shooting film with antique cameras, the results are groovy, both photographically and personally. That for the record is my future. The future may well be profitable.

Obake Gaijin. Ghost Foreigner.

A colleague asked me if I was committing professional suicide? It was nice to know she cared, but what suicide is there? Worst case one project has ended and another begins. Choosing not to write unfettered bullshit to kill stevesevilempire is my choice. Why would the truth that brain surgery, love, life and loss, hurt, cost me? Why would anyone choose to judge a physical recovery negatively? Unless they are a polarised hack journalist wanting to score points, what do these words say? They are saying that humanity can defeat BS any day of the week. Plus I am unafraid of the judgemental bastards that retail everywhere because they cannot hurt me. Yes someone I may never see again means the world to me. Is saying that insanity? If it is we will need bigger funny farms. Is it wrong to say that I am ashamed of face blindness, deeply cut knowing that Go Go Girl tried to talk to me over the years and I couldn’t see her? Deeply hurt by that truth my memory revealed last month, if you think it is wrong to admit that it says more about you than me. I admit that face blindness makes my skin crawl, I will admit that openly, and then I will put one foot in front of another and keep going forwards. (Just not in Hackney.) So stevesevilempire is now dead. I kill this project. Obake Gaijin is a nickname and that is all. From here on in Ghost Echoes Photos and Ghost Echoes Quarterly are the new projects, but they are written by me, Steve Merrick. It’s point is always human and we are all protected by the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights. Even an Obake Gaijin.

So allow a guy who’s first love was a Nikon F2 camera to admit that one human being almost matched it! Almost.

As this is the final entry for stevesevilempire folks, I can be contacted in future using the following email address.

ghostechoesphotos@icloud.com