Cursive

I first learned how to write in cursive in the third grade. But from first through fourth grade, I was homeschooled, so I progressed through my work at my own swift pace, passing fluidly from grade to grade as we toiled through the summers. So in truth, I’m not entirely sure if I learned cursive in the third grade or in the second, in the heat of summer or in the humid Floridian fall, but at some point I learned it, and as the years dragged on, abandoned it.

The handwriting sheets had thick blue lines, strict boundaries for the letters to exist between. The midpoint line was red, for symmetrical letter building. And between the midpoint and the boundary lines there were dashed guidelines for exacting precise lower-case letters and to act as ceilings for the looping tops of l’s. The printed examples at the top of each page were perfectly rounded and looped, designed on some 1990s-era version of Adobe Illustrator by someone writing educational textbooks for homeschooled second or third graders.

I remember staring eagerly at these sheets as I gripped a yellow Ticonderoga pencil. I had not yet grown anxious enough to leave bite marks on the hexagonal barrel or chew pieces of my fingernails. I would feel particularly satisfied before beginning my writing practice, inhaling the freshly sharpened scent of the newly exposed wood. The tip would sink smartly into the paper as I struggled to make my wobbly letters conform to printed expectation.

I don’t remember hating cursive, as many children do. I quite liked the look of it, especially the smooth, even script of my mother, whom I did not call mother, or teacher, but rather, Mom. Glancing from the loopy printed letters to her measured sentences, I realized that my fat scrawl appeared childlike and boring compared to hers. I tried to slant my letters like she did, but they ended up looking comically deflated, as if they had just been flattened by an obese dragon. When I went to public school in fifth grade, my neatly rounded letters were praised by my teachers, and my weekly Friday newsletters were lauded for both their creative content and the quality of the cursive writing contained therein.

But I sat unsatisfied at my cute cubby-hole desk. My letters were not sophisticated like my mother’s; rather, they were exceptional, but juvenile. Later that year, I would eventually write, in cursive, that one phrase that would come to define the next ten years of my creative life: “It was then I saw the house.” It was the first sentence of a story that would become a novel, which would become two novels, which would become a planned trilogy. It was a story that would eventually exist not in written script, but rather in typed Optima font on a cloud server in the Macintosh ether, because I learned quickly that no one, not even my mother, would elegantly handwrite five hundred pages of mages, fairies, and teenage romance.

By the time I had finished the second legitimate draft of the first book in 2010, it had been years since I had written in cursive. The steady demand of high school work had whittled down my patience into spunky, messy print. During my freshman year Major English Poets seminars at Yale, I would attempt to madly scribble cursive notes in the margins of Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. Maybe I thought writing in cursive would be faster, or maybe I wanted to appear sophisticated amongst my classmates. I assumed, in true Yale inferiority complex fashion, that they all knew far more about the English verse tradition than I did, and I thought that I would at least try to emulate their elegant handwriting. But the neat letters of my fifth grade newsletters had grown wild from disuse; e’s were flung carelessly from the ends of words, random print letters would haunt my capitals, mocking my neglect. My cursive was no longer exceptional, nor juvenile; it was a mess. Quietly I switched back to print, my mechanical pencil making strokes like thin, spindly sticks between Spenser’s perfectly printed serifs. I could not bite the Papermate plastic, so I chewed the corner of my right thumb, which was always callused from the daily press of my violin bow. I typed my mediocre papers in bland Times New Roman; I chewed my nails. For four years this went on. Then I graduated from Yale.

I was given a diploma entirely in Latin, a language I did not study, in a typeface that looked like it was trying very hard to appear Roman, but ended up looking too much like the Papyrus font preinstalled on Windows XP computers, and not like it belonged on a diploma issued by an Ivy League institution. I framed it anyway. In a few weeks, I was sitting in my hometown Starbucks, staring blankly at a blank journal page. I had no job and no local friends. I had allowed the obsessive journaling habits of my middle school and high school years to atrophy in the whirlwind that was Yale life. I found that I could blend my feelings into song lyrics, but I could not write them word for word. My stomach lurched; I chewed my nails, my pen frozen in my hand.

In my junior year, my songwriting teacher had demanded that we journal three pages a day. It was the only time I had written consistently at Yale. I would scribble my frustrations in a barely tolerable print-cursive hybrid at night, often after I had angrily completed my mediocre organic chemistry problem sets. My college boyfriend would sit at the edge of my bed, angry that I wouldn’t let him read my journals, often after he had quietly completed his exceptional physical chemistry problem sets. I remember not liking what I had to say. So when the class concluded, I took the songs and ran, but let the journals lapse. Over the years, I had crafted five worlds for my book, but after graduation, I was terrified to face my own. I could write songs and fiction, but I had lost the ability to write about myself.

So one day, at my hometown Starbucks, I tried. My efforts were worse than juvenile. My attempts to untangle my thoughts were blatant lies, and even the quality of my printed writing was abysmal. I needed some kind of guide. Floundering, I remembered the neat square boxes I had consumed when I was first learning how to construct Chinese characters. Each character has a stroke order that must be followed; otherwise, characters appear wonky, haphazard, and generally illegible. Even with practice, our class’s collective hanzi were described in giggling tones by our teachers as looking awkward but endearing, as if a child had written them. I remembered merely smiling ruefully at them, shrugging, absentmindedly biting my nails. Nothing new under the Beijing sun.

The boxes had forced me, however, to be patient. If I raced through the stroke practice, my characters would be sloppy, and I wouldn’t remember them. Patience was what I needed: patience with my thoughts, patience with my writing. I resolved then, in Starbucks, to write in cursive from then on. I would relearn how to write in script, juvenile or not; it ceased to matter. I needed to slow down. My thoughts, my anxiety, and my fingernails, demanded it.

A year later, I now have several notebooks full of cursive. The beginning pages are ugly and halting. The letters are ill-formed; the thoughts are balking, angry, embarrassed. But I learned to set the words in motion and learned I didn’t have to stop and read them over again. The act of writing was often enough. Throughout the year following my graduation, across the table, my mother would sit and sketch with me before I went to work. On the rare occasion that she would write longer paragraphs, I would glimpse her beautiful script. It appeared unchanged to me, but I knew this couldn’t be true. Handwriting evolves, like the people behind it. The letters, and the words they form, are fluid. They don’t just bear the marks, they are the marks of what has come before.

Now I glance over the pages of this particular stretch of text. I initially penned it on real quadrille paper, with real ink flowing from my favorite Pilot fountain pen. My fingernails, visible at the base of the nib, still show signs of casualty, but they are healthier than they were. Thoughts pass more freely from my brain to the pen, and trust flows again between the page and me. My cursive is still wild and loopy: rounded in some parts, squashed by a dragon in others. The years of atrophy have left their mark. But after months of practice, the words have begun to slant, and the letters are angled and sharp, dancing on the brink of sophistication. Glancing across the table, I realize they are an imperfect mirror of hers, our genetically linked muscles coaxing similar rhythms from the ink. And as we sit together again, our pens move in harmony, if not in synchrony, sending cursive thoughts into the page.