Carbon copies

Let me sign my life at the ledger of your contract. We shall do business by exchanging our names.

A quintessential and exquisite flick of a plume to compliment the intellectualism and pretense that lives under your tired eyes. Slowly stitched into the fibres of paper, you take every effort to make your signature known. The window into your soul opens at the point your pen leaves the paper. Your dreams. Your future. Your ambition.

We take our penmanship for signatures for granted. It’s our footprint on official documents. It’s our silent statement to say “yes! I condone this!”. It’s our form of appreciation, or our form of confirmation. It’s our way to agree. It’s our way to sell ourselves.

Some of us may have practiced millions of times before we decide on the perfect signature. Some of us determine our signature by being pressured to sign our first document. By and large, we learn because we are forced to mark papers.

But to think there are millions of unique signatures in the world, each with their own permutations of who is who. Even if people share the same names, it is rare to see them share the same signature. Or the same penmanship.

But this fascination and complex relationship of ourselves and our signatures are never appreciated by third parties. They are all interested in the carbon copies. Keep the details minimal, ignore the fleuron or the consistent dot at the end of the signature. Forget the depth at which the ink is pressed in based on the pressure of the hand that wrote it, or the abrupt turns that surround a galaxy of illegible, but nonetheless beautiful letters. We all just want to see who signed it, with no particular interest in analyzing who is signing it – the sense of elegance disappears through the duplication of the original. The third party takes the carbon copy, ,and you keep the original. Only you are the holder of your own elegance.

Only you can appreciate what you’ve created – the rest of the world just want to see you deal with business they are conducting.

Never forget to break free and love what is around you, because those that feel loveless to their surroundings cannot appreciate the mere essence of existing.