—immutable, permanent, present tense in perpetuity.
Your doctor shows you the x-rays. Shows you how your radius was fractured all the way across, but luckily, just above the growth plate. He tells you that bone is not static. It is a turning thing, a thing motivated to heal. He hopes you’ll take comfort in that.
Your therapist says the same thing about memory, but prefers not to describe concepts in the negative. Instead he uses the words dynamic and mutable—he speaks of redemption through reinvention and imagination.
All the while, you think no, memory isn’t like that at all: memories, especially the brutal ones, develop without blemish or artefact—all that was sensed and subsequently perceived is laid onto film stock in the darkroom of the mind—immutable, permanent, present tense in perpetuity.
(Source: Amir Adam—Physical Education, Image—Nathan Bajar)