Happy Sunday!
I’m currently drafting this from De Mello Coffee, a café in midtown tucked inside the colourful strip of stores on Yonge Street.
A few years ago, I purchased a copy of the Toronto Café Passport. The Passport provides a list of recommended cafés and coffeehouses in Toronto; mostly independent stores as opposed to chains. When I purchased the Passport, I was going through a low point in my life and wanted to start a personal project to cheer myself up with. I had a vision that I would take myself on little adventures around the city by making a point of trying out a bunch of the listed cafés. For whatever reason, I didn’t get around to doing it at the time. But, yesterday, I was leafing through the Passport again and thought I might try resurrecting this idea.
The Passport is a quirky little book. I don’t have the most recent edition and I’m not sure when mine was released. Skimming through its pages, I noted that several of the coffeehouses listed have closed, some have relocated, and others have evolved into larger, more well-known chains (I questioned why Aroma Espresso Bar, for example, was listed among the others).
Anyway- the Passport is how I ended up drinking an iced oat latte at De Mello on a Sunday morning. De Mello is a small coffeehouse chain with a handful of locations in Toronto, as well as one shop in Kingston (Ontario) and one in Korea. Although De Mello opened its first location in 2013 (at 2489 Yonge Street, where I am), the brand is totally new to me. The shop is eclectically decorated with street art on the walls and umbrellas and posters on the ceiling. It’s clearly very well-loved in the midtown community: though it’s relatively early in the morning and bitterly cold outside, it’s quite busy. I’m sitting in a seating area at the back of the store amidst a large group of runners who have pulled a few tables together and are chatting loudly. There are also a few women, like me, on their own and working on their laptops. While I would certainly return to the café, I wouldn’t hold my breath about using it as a peaceful place to work (if I can find a seat at all).
I wish I were more of a coffee sommelier so that I can give a review of De Mello’s coffee itself, but unfortunately, I’m not. I also doubt an iced oat latte is the best drink to have when judging the quality of a coffee. What I will say is that my drink is pleasant- it strikes a good balance with the proportions of milk and coffee. I also like whatever oat milk that they use.
Something I’m thinking about as I write this is a recent trend I’ve been seeing online (“2026 is the new 2016”) where users have been posting pictures from 2016 to reminiscence on life ten years ago. Personally, in 2016, I was nineteen and twenty: an adult, but only just. I was in the middle of my undergraduate studies, pursuing a Bachelor of Science in psychology (and a women’s studies certificate). I wanted to be a writer. I had bright red hair that I dyed and cut myself into an asymmetrical bob. My hobbies all revolved around creative pursuits- I kept a blog, regularly made art, took pictures and made videos. My life was documented meticulously on the internet (though, much of it has been deleted now). I was an avid reader. I hated exercising- I wasn’t a runner, and, in fact, I hadn’t even purchased my first fitness tracker yet. I was just introduced to minimalism as a lifestyle, and was fascinated by it. I dreamed of living alone in an apartment in the city. In so many ways, I’m very different from the person I was in 2016; but in so many others, I’m exactly the same. In many respects, I am living the life that I dreamed of back then.
This conversation reminds me of a passage from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, where the protagonist Esther talks about her life and its possibilities like a fig tree:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet”.
I often romanticize my early twenties because at that time it felt like I had an endless number of possibilities in front of me when considering my life ahead. My fig tree was full of ripe, purple fruits. Then I chose to go to law school. I plucked a fig off of my tree, and others ripened and fell.
There are some figs I’ve been okay with losing- for example, for most of my childhood and teenhood, I wanted to pursue music, and I no longer dream about this. And though there are fewer figs on my tree today than there were ten years ago, some fruits have remained clinging to its branches- artist, academic, writer– that haven’t fallen, even after all this time. I find myself constantly thinking about pivoting and picking a new fig. I know there is a way to get a taste of all of them, but it will involve compromise. And the older I get, the more set in my routines I become and the more intimidating the prospect of change seems.
This all makes me wonder how my life will pan out from here, and where I’ll be ten years in the future, when 2036 is the new 2026.
I’m struggling to end this blog post. I hope you’re happy with the figs you picked in life, or, if you’re not, I hope you find that there are still plenty to choose from in the branches above you.
With love,
Laura Kate
Laura Katherine 