Sign Your Name Across My Heart

It's important to prepare for the future. I like to tie that in with my everyday responsibilities (looks like too many i's, hmmm). For instance, today I am preparing for my future signing autographs by signing my name to 230 promotional letters, for that personalized touch. When you sign your name that often, you begin to wonder how anyone could notice a forgery.

I crafted my current signature when I was in high school. I added the middle initial sometime near the end of my senior year, when I decided every important business person (which I intended to be) used their middle initials. I changed my capital A from the round cursive style to a large ponity letter that swooped around like half a star into a tall L, beginning the repeated humps and loops that make up the E, X, and I, until abruptly changing direction and circling into the small A that looks like the old capital once did. From the end of the A, the line swoops around once again, stopping briefly over the I, then slashing down through the unfinished X, sometimes making a light curl at the bottom, one smooth line for all five letters and all the necessary dots and tiddles. Sometimes my pen gets stuck in the bumps and I can't discern the X from the I, or there is no I, or I dot the X and slash the I. Sometimes the capital A looks normal-sized, sometimes imposing and wobbly.

The C. is sometimes small, as inconsequential as the lowercases, sometimes as big as the capitals. Sometimes it just floats there in the middle, perfectly poised between "Alexia" and "Henke," being the perfect median, the sixth letter, the link in the chain. I can't sign my name without the C. Without the C., I'd rather just be Alexia on paper. Or Ms. Henke. I never say, "Hello, this is Alexia C. Henke." That would just be odd. But it has to be written.

The H is two parallel lines joined by a another swoop that starts an extremely volatile mix of letters. The E is not so bad (although it sometimes comes out more like an "i"). but the N has a tendency to become M, and the K wants to be H. Sometimes there's nothing I can do. I try to be careful, but the more I think about it, the worse it gets. The last E is a desperate attempt to just get out before something bad happens. It barely exists. No grand flourish at the end like the first name, just a small, sad, little E that looks like it's trying to run away, right off the page.

Other than these things, all my signatures come out differently. My letters know how they're supposed to behave, but my hand won't help them. I squeeze the pen so tight I can only get out two or three at a time. After signing 50 I have a red mark on my middle finger. My hands sweat and I have to stop and wait before I go on. Take a break. It feels like I don't know how to sign my own name anymore. It looks strange, alien. Is this my name? Why does it look that way? Why don't I have pretty, flowing script, like my mother, or a mad, doctor's scrawl, like my father (who is not a doctor)? I become so used to typing everything that writing in script is a hardship, but the only way I know how to write (except for envelopes and to-do lists, of course). I even wrote all my college notes (lo, these many years gone by) in cursive. I don't think anyone was meant to sign their own name this many times in a row. That's what they make the rubber stamps for.