I get to the bar (yes, I know – once again, it’s a bar, I clearly have no creative range) and I’m early, which gives me the perfect amount of time to silently judge everyone around me. On my right (my favourite): a couple where the man keeps looking over at me. On my left: a gaggle of 19-year-old uni boys aggressively bonding over litres of beer and newly-found emotional intelligence.

I’ve come prepared, obviously. I’ve got The List – you know, the one we all compile before hanging out with a new acquaintance. Mine includes: three humiliating things I did this week, some quality gossip about people Raphael (aforementioned acquaintance / potential friend) doesn’t even know yet (otherwise known as my good friends), and of course, the usual bullet points about creepy men following me off the metro or trying to play amateur upskirt photographer. Classic stuff. Whether these stories are true or not, peu importe, doesn’t matter, what’s important is that I recount them. 

Raphael finally shows up and we do la bise – which, let’s be honest, is the French’s lifelong attempt to sexualize things (such as greetings) that have absolutely no need to involve cheeks, lips, or awkward head choreography.

The meet up begins with his “hey,” followed by my stretched-out “heyyy,” which says: I am friendly, mildly unhinged, relatable, and possibly already tipsy. Then I toss out a few generic questions about his life – the sort of polite probing I’ll forget by the time I wake up tomorrow. 

But we all know the truth: no one asks questions at the start of a bar hangout because they care. It’s a social dance, a necessary ritual to justify why two people are sitting across from each other in public rather than doom-scrolling alone in their overpriced 16m² studio.

I’m not here for small talk anyway – today I want the juicy stuff. Who does he secretly hate? What instantly repels him in women? Which painfully calculated “oops” moment from my week can I serve him as proof that I’m both relatable and hilarious? Let the curated vulnerability begin. Let me morph into my story-telling comedic genius. 

I’m just about to dive into my first humiliation of the week (accidentally texting “she’s a fucking arsehole” to the actual fucking arsehole in question) when Raphael taps his hands on the table and goes, “Do you maybe wanna go grab us two beers?” with this wide-eyed, golden-retriever smile that says: I am harmless and adorable and potentially a little bit of a freeloader.

At first, I don’t really register it, I’m too caught up in the fizzy little pre-story euphoria I get before recounting something embarrassing about Me. Like a pre-tale orgasm. Honestly, it’s hard to describe, but if you’ve ever felt proud of your own pain, or imagined pain, you’ll understand.

So off I trot to the altar of the bar, where a pixie-cut bartender with botanical forearm tattoos is busy refusing to acknowledge my existence – first with a solid stare-through, then with a ten-minute lag before accepting I’m real.

While I wait, I replay the moment in my head. The way he said it. The word “grab” instead of “get”. Grab us two beers. How effortlessly he made me get up and pay for our drinks. It was smooth. Almost… elegant. Like a scam, but friendly.

Then I think, No, no, don’t be petty. He’ll probably get the next round. 

We’re both guzzling down our beers (he drinks faster than me, which I respect – it takes commitment to alcoholism to beat me), and I’ve just finished rattling off my three humiliating stories of the week. He doesn’t laugh nearly as much as I expected. In fact, his facial reactions hover somewhere between mildly amused and resting café chair. A few polite lip twitches, nothing life-changing.

Undeterred, I move on to the gossip portion of the evening, the bit where I let him in on the lives of people he doesn’t know, and may never meet, but must learn to care about if we’re going to be friends. Or anything vaguely resembling it.

He actually has seen my friends before – the first time we met, they were there. So to jog his memory, I say: “You know, the fake blonde? She was there when we met. The one obsessed with astrology who interrogated you about your star sign for three hours?”

This is my cue to subtly separate myself from those girls. You know, the ones who believe Mercury in retrograde is a valid excuse for ghosting or something. I love informing men – friend or future disappointment – that I am not one of those astrology girls. (Right after which, I usually follow up with: “I don’t get girls who order those fancy pink cocktails. Just give me a beer and I’m good.” Or: “God, she wears so much makeup. I don’t even own foundation.” Just kidding, I’m no that bad – but my sentences do sometimes have that faint pick-me musk I can't quite Febreze out of myself.)

“Anyway,” I continue, spiraling further into girl betrayal, “she’s actually the most selfish person I know. Like, textbook. I literally Googled narcissistic traits and she ticks every single box. Every time we meet, it has to be near her flat. God forbid she travel more than one metro stop.”

I’m still slandering my best friend – whom I love dearly, of course – when I notice Raphael’s face has not shifted once. He’s got the same expression you’d wear while watching someone assemble IKEA furniture.

So I panic and then I pivot.

“When was the first time you saw Borat?” I ask, completely out of nowhere.

Random? Absolutely. But sometimes you need Sacha Baron Cohen to pull you out of a social catastrophe.

He blinks at me, confused. “Is that… The Dictator guy?”

Immediately, my brain hisses: cancelled. Anyone who references The Dictator when I clearly said the elite Borat is, in my books, spiritually excommunicated. But… fine. I let it slide. One mercy per man.

Anyway, I’m eager to get back to my story. The one about my narcissistic best friend, astrology girls, and – ideally – the tale of my evil upstairs neighbour, which I planned to squeeze in before we finished our first beers. (We’re halfway through the second now, which I paid for again cus he never got up. The schedule is collapsing.)

So I search for a link – a narrative bridge between my fake-blonde, star-sign-worshipping best friend and the nightmare in human form who lives above me and treats my cigarette breaks like acts of terrorism.

“Speaking of narcissists,” I begin, proudly, “my upstairs neighbor. My God.” I exhale sharply – the French puff of disdain. “What. A. Bitch.”

I launch into the story of how she came banging on my door the other night, yelling at me for smoking. She’s Polish, furious, and gives off the exact same vibe as those girls in high school who dated one other weird guy and together they became their own freaky microclimate. I’m mid-rant – on a roll, honestly – when Raphael lifts his hand like he’s about to ask a question in class, or like he’s Jesus about to turn a blind man’s life around.

“Lena…” he says.

I pause. Breathless. “Yeah?”

He taps the table with his other hand, staring up as if searching for his words in the cracks of the bar ceiling.  

“It’s just… I’m really trying to be more positive lately. And like… I don’t know, you’ve been saying a lot of negative stuff. For the past hour. And it’s just… it’s kind of leaving a sour taste in my mouth.”

Silence.

My heart caves in. It feels like I’ve been slapped. Hard. And with a dead fish.

And the worst part? This isn’t even the kind of humiliation I can recycle into a funny story. It’s not funny nor charming. This is humiliation with no punchline. Just me, holding a warm beer, reeking of character assassination, and slowly realising I might actually be… the bitch who’s not funny enough to get away with it. 

“Ha ha…” I mutter, draining the last of my beer like it’s a magic potion that might erase the past ten minutes. “Sorry…”

“Don’t worry,” he says, smiling. It seems… genuine. Unfortunately.

“There are just so many positive things we could talk about,” he continues, “The weather’s beautiful, summer’s coming, maybe we have fun plans on the horizon. You know?”

I feel sick. And no – not in a maybe I’m pregnant kind of way. I took a test. Twice. This nausea is purely emotional. It's my turn now: I’ve got the sour taste in my mouth, and it’s not from the warm beer.

But I smile – the kind of brittle, PR-trained smile you give when someone tells you they’re really into crypto.

“Sure,” I say. “I get you. Positivity…”

“Yes!” he says, lighting up. “Positivity is good!”

And just like that, his face slides directly into the slappable category of my mental filing system. It lands somewhere between “guy who claps when the plane lands” and “guy who says 'no bad vibes' while actively bringing the bad vibes.”

Well, first of all, my list is screwed. I can’t imagine Raphael finding the “positive angle” on a man filming up my skirt. Unless I lie and say I sort of liked it; maybe I invent a follow-up where the guy sent me the video, we became friends, and now we co-host a podcast about boundaries. That could be positivity coded? But that feels like a stretch, even for me.

So I sit there, empty-handed. I click my tongue against my teeth. Looking at him. 

But since I’ve already decided that this ray of sunshine cannot – and will not – be my friend, it doesn’t really matter what I say anymore. The pressure evaporates. That need to fill silences, to perform, to entertain – gone. It slips away like the desire to impress a man five seconds after realising you feel absolutely nothing for him.

I let him talk. I let him shine. I offer up the conversational stage – the positivity podium – so he can monologue about gratitude, or smoothies, or whatever else brings positive people joy.

I try to join in.

“So… are you happy?” I ask.

It feels like a positive question. It has “happy” in it. That counts, right?

But even I can hear the dark undertones slithering beneath the surface, and I give up again. There’s a brief pause, and then we both get the look. That mutual, silent understanding that this night – which could’ve gone on for two more hours if we were two completely different people – is now in its final ten-minute run.

On the metro home, I open my Notes app and type:

“Story about positivity douchebag to tell at next drinks.”

I close my eyes and think about how I’ll tell it – how I’ll twist it just right, how I’ll get the pacing and the eyebrow raises perfect. How I’ll make people laugh. How I’ll make everyone see what an arsehole he was.

And then I smile to myself.

Smiling is positive, right? ;)