From a series of 144-word essays on Untitled Thought Project, Lacey’s Substack newsletter. This entry was published in October.
I’ve been doing paperwork in Mexico City, signing thing after thing.
However, some doubt arose concerning my identity. The nine-year-old signature on my passport did not match the one I had been putting everywhere, on everything. I had mistakenly assumed we accepted the way a signature degrades over time, how it grows hastier, less sure of itself. The authorities didn’t accept this degradation, no, and requested an in-person appearance to re-sign all the things.
Here you must choose a signature and commit. A señor hovered over me as I tried to perform my name the way I once had—upright, tense, and contained. (Lately it had gone soupy.) He examined my new effort, compared with my nearly expired passport.
He pointed to the t. The horizontal line needed to be longer, so I lengthened it, and was thus recognized, by Mexico, to be myself.