She felt happy one evening walking home.

She held a large paper bag in her arms and thought: This is what it feels like to do something for someone else. This is what it feels like to love them.

She stopped at the store to get India Pale Ale because earlier that day Mark forwarded an email to her that contained his annual professional review along with a note he wrote specifically to her. The review was very positive and was written by the senior professor who observed Mark’s class a few weeks before. His note said: I am not the worst person in the world. She knew he was relieved and happy.

She knew, also, that he loved India Pale Ale. She spoke to the attractive shopkeeper who was a hipster well versed on topics such as novelty beer and who suggested a variety of specialty IPAs. She asked a lot of questions because she did not drink beer and when she chose a particular assortment, the shopkeeper told her it was a good gift. If someone got me this, he said, I’d be very happy. She was inexplicably proud to have this stranger’s approval and happily walked home with a six-pack of unusual and fancy IPAs, including a seasonal, two locals and three with different types of hops to compare.

As she walked through the park she thought about the note she would write for the beer and also the note she would write for the front door.

A few months before Mark’s positive review, she received her own critique in class. It was her first critique ever as a writing student and she had been very anxious. Every Monday night from 7:00-10:00 p.m. over the course of ten weeks, she’d had flu symptoms.

Her skin all blotchy-red, sticky, was embarrassed to exist or be associated with her. Her brain was distracted with worry that her mouth would say something ridiculous, give the rest of her away so everyone would realize how not-talented, how not-smart she actually was, meaning she would have to finally accept it was actually, really true.

Mark, who had encouraged her to take the course in the first place. He’d said: You should keep at this. Truly. after he read a few pages of something or other. It made her feel lighter. She thought: this is what ‘Possibility’ must feel like. It was a good feeling. Like love.

Mark sat in the living room on the orange puffy chair with blue diamond shapes late that night, reading the New Yorker, waiting to hear how it went. Filled with such an enormous relief, she was compelled to dance from their entryway into and through the living room to Mark, making up some moves, which ended up being some combination of the running man and ninja-like kicks. And to answer the unspoken question hovering in the air between them, she sang the first thing that came to her:

I’m not
the worst person
in the world.

Which she later realized was likely inspired by a lyric her good friend Jake wrote:

I’m the
greatest singer
in the world.

The line felt so beautiful, so sad. Lonely, she thought. And she loved it.

To say she was an awful singer would give her too much credit. She could not be called a singer at all. Nor a dancer. Perhaps because of this, the extemporaneous song and dance made Mark laugh.

He knew she was relieved and happy. It seemed her classmates did not hate what she made, she told him. And from then on whenever either one of them was relieved and happy or had accomplished anything of any sort, one or the other of them said: I’m not the worst person in the world.

Now, there she was, walking through the trees on the winding paths through their park, the dappled sunlight coating the late afternoon, thinking about what she should write. On the front door she thought she might post a notice of eviction:

EVICTION NOTICE:

To: The worst person in the world.


(All those who are not the worst person in the world may enter).

As for a note on the beer—it’d be scrawled in black marker on plain white paper, she thought, hastily taped to the six-pack, as if one could scarcely bother to take the time to congratulate him. That would be funny.

“Congratulations,”
Or Whatever.

It would say.

And so, on the day Mark received a good review, she grabbed two sheets of plain paper from the printer’s tray and rummaged through the kitchen drawer to find a large black Sharpie. She felt good and purposeful and thought: This is what it feels like to love someone.

On the first sheet of plain paper, she wrote her “Congratulations.” On the second she scrawled out an eviction notice that would not evict either of them.

Later that night when he got home she would hear the silence as he paused outside the front door, his keys settling in the doorknob for a moment, and his familiar “Ha!”

She would almost hear his smile.