trisha victoria

there are coffee shops you go to because they make good coffee. then there are coffee shops that quietly become part of your life story.

i do a lot of editing at work. but today, let me write. no edits, grammatical inconsistencies whatever. memory over polish 😌 because today was Parlour’s last day before it closes and rebrands.

i was in university when i first started going there. Winnipeg’s coffee scene looked very different then. third wave coffee was just starting to take shape, and Parlour was the first one here. small. intentional. no wi-fi. which, in 2011, somehow felt less like a punishment and more like a personality. lol.

housed in a century-old heritage building, industrial minimalist design. less than ten seats. i had my spot. by the window. sometimes with a notebook and pen. sometimes with a book. sometimes with absolutely nothing. before solitude became something people started romanticizing. back when sitting alone in a café wasn’t considered self-care. it was just…tuesday.

feeling ko that’s where my two lifelong habits began: 1. loving coffee on a deeply personal level
(or, to say, spending an irresponsible amount of money on coffee as a broke university student hahah), and 2. realizing i actually enjoyed my own company.

long before cafés became places to answer emails or join virtual meetings, that little corner was where i learned that solitude wasn’t something to escape. it was actually something to enjoy. hours passed without feeling the need to be productive. i used to write a lot back then, so i’d write when words came. read when they didn’t. sometimes i’d simply watch people walk by while my coffee went cold.

the window helped. that’s where my hobby of people-watching started 👀 turns out all i needed to understand myself was a problematic amount of caffeine and a high chair facing the window on Main Street. dramatic. poetic. or whatever you call that. hahahah

it sounds ordinary, diba? but that café witnessed several versions of me. the university student trying to figure life out. the twenty-something girl collecting heartbreaks lol. with each one of those somehow tasted slightly better with an americano made with beans from guatemala, sometimes ethiopia. the version of me celebrating small wins that felt enormous at the time. the version of me that believed everything was urgent. and eventually, presently, the one that learned not everything had to be.

funny how a place can know so much about you without knowing your name.

the strange thing about some places is that they keep your memories even when you’ve forgotten you left them there. mine are probably still sitting by that window.

i’ve noticed that one by one, the cafés that shaped Winnipeg’s coffee culture are closing their doors or becoming something else. nakakalungkot tbh. but that’s the nature of cities, i suppose. they evolve. as they should. new places arrive, and new people fall in love with them.

thing is, i realized my landmarks in this city aren’t really statues or buildings. they’re cafés. tiny ones.

they say you can never go back to who you were. apparently, neither can coffee shops.

i went out the door of Parlour thinking that maybe we don’t always notice the places that change us while we’re in them. sometimes it only becomes obvious when they quietly say goodbye.

au revoir, petit café. merci pour tout. c’était bien.