Sylvia’s handwriting was looping and crisp and clean. Though she was my girlfriend, I was, as with most girls I knew in high school, intensely jealous of her penmanship—of what seemed, at the time, like its unreachable, feminine perfection. My handwriting was, by comparison, a mess: the hand of a drunken man trying to scrawl down gibberish while riding on the back of a motorcycle, a different script every time. It wasn’t neatness or clarity on their own that I envied, though—it was the solidity and consistency of someone who wrote the same way each time, could reliably and assuredly express themselves. In the same manner, day after day, manifested on the page, they seemed to be saying: I know who I am—here, let me show you.