Free Write on Atrophy by Emily Searle-White

Ever since I was little, I’ve had pictures come to mind when I close my eyes, some that would come very often.  It was a fight between me and my brain – it was me trying and probing, cautiously enjoying a part of my mind I couldn’t control.

One such image was that of a small polar bear on an ice floe. As I watched, eyes either closed or drifting lazily out and up, the floe would tilt to the side and the bear would slide into the water. I shook my head: the floe righted itself. And it would happen again. It was work to keep the floe balanced, but who was I working against? My thoughts said to this image of my own creation, “No – stay!” – and I would see it tilt before me again.

This is the experience, the thought-maze, that is easiest to explain. The other one that recurred has less movement. The other one was just an image of a person – deformed. It didn’t start deformed, though. As I watched, a figure would appear in my mind and then gradually, it’s head would shrink, or swell, like a cartoon until it was a cruel caricature of humanness. I felt so uncomfortable seeing it happen. It might have been funny if I hadn’t wanted it to stop, and if I hadn’t simultaneously been the one making it happen, though I didn’t know how.

Bodies can’t be right or wrong, but it seems they can be malformed, disfigured, atrophied. Atrophy – makes me think of the desert – devoid of moisture, softness. Deserts are very like atrophy in a way that dogs and waterfalls are not. A desert makes you think of what it is not – of green, of wet, of safety. A dog doesn’t make you think of a cat, but a limb, partially or completely wasted away – makes you think of what it could have, might have been.

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I would recognize that handwriting anywhere. If you do not nourish a body, it wastes away, it shrivels, tightens, folds and fades. It is nothing without support. Do memories atrophy? I have no idea when or why you wrote that sentence on this page, but there’s no doubt in my mind that you were the one who wrote it. And when the door opens and the mix of apple cider and old sheets of music crashes into my nose, I’ll know the memory of my grandparents’ house has not faded, folded, nor collapsed. What has a memory that flesh has not?