Write a word you've not written in ten years and watch your hand find it.

Try it. Pick something from another life. The name of a street you no longer live on. A word from a language you took in school and let go. The name of somebody you used to write to. Don't think about the letters. Just start, and watch.

Your hand knows. It goes. There is a small hesitation on the first stroke and then the whole word comes out in the shape it had a decade ago, and the shape isn't the one you'd use now. The loops are the old loops. The slant is the slant you had then. For the length of one word, the hand is a younger hand, and it has been keeping this the whole time, in some drawer you did not know you had.

The drawer

I didn't understand how much was in the drawer until I found my grandmother's recipe cards.

A shoebox of them, in a kitchen that was being emptied. Index cards, most of them, some torn from other things. Her handwriting. And her handwriting was her. I don't mean that it was distinctive, though it was. I mean that reading it was like hearing her voice in the next room. The specific way she crossed a t, low and long, like she was in a hurry. The capital G that started every "Grease the pan" and had a flourish she could not suppress even in a recipe. On one card there is a word she crossed out and wrote again and the second one is pressed harder, and I know exactly what expression was on her face when she did that, because I've seen it.

Nobody has that from a typed page. A typed page has words. The card had her hand on it, still, pressing.

I kept the cards. I've not made any of the recipes. That was never what they were for.

The portrait

Here's what I think handwriting actually is, now that we are losing it. It's a portrait you don't know you're making.

Every line you write with a pen records how fast you were going and how hard you were pressing and where you paused and whether your hand was steady. It records whether you were tired. It records, I'm fairly sure, whether you were lying, because I've looked at notes I wrote when I was lying and they're wrong in a way I can see and not describe. The letters are the same. Something in the pressure is off. My hand knew, and it told on me, in a language only I can read.

Your handwriting when you're in love is different from your handwriting when you're grieving. Your handwriting at twenty is different from your handwriting at forty, and not the way your face is different, more the way your voice is different, worn in the same places. Anyone who has kept a diary in pen for a long time knows this. You can open it to a random page and know the year, and the mood, before you read a word. The words are what you were thinking. The hand is what you were.

I've kept one other thing, which is a note from a friend, four words on a torn corner, left on a kitchen counter fifteen years ago. The words are not important. What I kept it for is the pressure. He wrote it fast, standing up, with a pen that was running out, and you can see the exact place where he had to go over a letter twice to get the ink to come. He's fine. We still talk. But that scrap has more of him in it than any message he's sent me since, and I couldn't tell you why except that his hand was on it, leaning, for about three seconds, in a hurry, being him.

The signature

My signature has been changing my whole life and I've never once decided to change it.

At sixteen it was my name, carefully, every letter. At twenty-five it was my name at speed, the letters starting to lean into each other. Now it's a shape. Two humps and a line, and the line has a hook at the end that I couldn't tell you the origin of. It doesn't say my name. It says something else, something I don't have access to. If you asked me to draw my signature slowly I couldn't do it. It only exists at speed. It's a thing my hand does, not a thing I do, and if that isn't a definition of the unconscious I don't know what is.

I signed a lease last year on a tablet with my finger and the shape came out the same. Same humps, same hook. Nobody was watching. The tablet didn't care. My hand did it anyway, because it had been asked to sign, and this is what signing is, and it's going to keep being that until the hand stops.

What the keyboard flattens

I type most of what I write, including this, and I'm not going to pretend that's a tragedy. But I notice what the keyboard does, and what it does is remove the hand.

Every letter comes out the same. My tired e is the same as my rested e. My lying e is the same as my honest e. The page has words and only words, and the words are all I am giving, and the reader gets the thoughts with none of the pressure. It's cleaner. It is also, in a way I didn't expect to mind, less true. The keyboard has an alibi for everything. The pen never did.

I've started, in the last year, writing letters again. Real ones, to two or three people, on paper. They're worse letters than my emails. I cannot edit. The sentences go where the hand takes them. But the people who get them say things about them that nobody has ever said about an email, and I think what they're responding to is the pressure. The evidence of a person, leaning on a pen, in a room, thinking of them.

The word

I did the thing at the top of this piece before I wrote it. I wrote the name of a street I lived on when I was twenty-two and haven't written since. The hand went. It came out in the slant of a person who thought he was going to be a different kind of person, and I sat there looking at it for longer than I mean to admit.

The hand knew the street. The hand knew the year. The hand had kept it, without being asked, in case I ever needed it.

I think I did.