When I was nineteen years old, my boyfriend at the time told
me that he had what he thought was a really smart strategy for signing his name
to things.
“I just make everything after the M a squiggle,” he said. “That
way no one can read it. If anyone asks, I can just say it’s not my signature.”
He had a very serious look on his face as he explained this.
“So you have plausible deniability?” I said, using two words
he didn’t know.
He looked confused but went with it. “Yeah!” he said.
I sat there, reevaluating my life choices. Was he really
that good in bed? “Um, I don’t think it works that way,” I finally said.
“Why not?” he wanted to know.
“Why even sign in the first place?” I countered. This seemed
to stump him.
I don’t remember why the topic came up, or even what, if
any, specific document he’d seemed so reluctant to sign. I remember being
baffled by the man’s logic, because I intuited that a signature doesn’t
necessarily need to be legible in order to bear legal evidentiary power. In the
U.S., at least, a wide
variety of marks can count as signatory, including rubber stamps, digital
signatures, a personalized symbol or even an X.
When I was young, I was conscientious about my signature in
a way that I wasn’t about my love life. I wrote my signature carefully, forming
each letter in cursive as I had been taught to in grade school penmanship
class. Whenever I signed my name to anything I did so while looking sweaty and
shaky, because I was worried that my signature wouldn’t look right and the
cashier at the Circle K would think I was impersonating myself.
As I got older, my signature became sloppier and sloppier –
the degeneration of my signature occurs in direct correlation to the decline of my ability
to give a f&ck. You know how they say, “Correlation does not equal
causation”? Well, in this case, it does.
The first casualty was the capital A in my last name. At some point I stopped making a large, round,
cursive capital A and just started
putting in a printed A. Then I
ditched the c in my last name, making
it smaller and moving it up, and then finally turning it into an apostrophe.
Sometime later, I turned the cursive Ms
into printed Ms and then into big
squiggly lines. Meanwhile, the Es on
the end of my name gradually flattened more and more, until they became a flat
line. Finally, a few months ago, I was signing my name to a credit card receipt
and I decided, “F&ck it, life’s too short, but my name isn't short enough," and just lopped the Es off altogether. Now my signature
reads, Marjorie M’At.
I think the Rs
will be the next to go.
