Your mad scrawl

Your handwriting makes me think you are insane. It is the handwriting Henry VIII might have had.  If David Berkowitz had ever sent me a letter himself, I would've glanced at the envelope and assumed it came from you. Those angular right-angled tails of your js and gs, the spiky K of your first initial--they are all so singularly bizarre. I wonder why you don't use orange ink. Or a gray the color of a spider's hair.

I have wide experience with deciphering illegibility. I can recognize the handwriting of a person with a learning disability in a heartbeat, but yours is not that. It's not exactly not that, either. You might have a learning disability, but something more ominous lurks in the curves of your capital s.

There is a term that students with IEPs use, dysgraphia. It just means bad handwriting to me. I have been in a conference with a parent who became enraged with a teacher who said he could not read the son's handwriting, as if it was a character flaw. Also, I am certain it is a character flaw. Everyone can learn penmanship, and if one declines to do so, that indicates laziness, narcissism, dysfunction and squalor. Your demeanor--and I mean yours, not just anyone's--can fool a lot of people, but the minute you scribble on a Post-it, you give yourself away. You would do better to email all with whom you must communicate, not that I want to abet you in masking your psychosis.

But enough. I don't want to think about your frightening handwriting any more. Visualizing the slopes and swirls makes me feel like Alice in Through the Looking Glass as she tried to follow the path that kept giving itself a shake and turning back to the same door. It is a volatile path, your  handwriting, and the door it leads to is madness. I used to sign the test papers they made me bring home with your flourish whenever I made a C. I shiver to think how perfectly I can emulate it.