IN THE PRISON OF EXISTENCE AT LEAST WE HAVE TATTE

IN THE PRISON OF EXISTENCE, AT LEAST THERE IS TATTE

Tatte Bakery & Cafe is the only coffee chain that has never disappointed me. True only in the sense that the bar is on the floor. I don’t enjoy conversations with friendly strangers, can’t taste the difference between an Americano and instant coffee, and the one time a barista at a different shop gave me a drink for free, I panicked about it (loudly) for ten minutes.

But my girl Tatte has never failed to charge me. Its black and white tiled interiors, hanging lamps, and massive picture windows, reminiscent of the compound eyes of some eldritch-horror distributed consciousness, form centers of aesthetic gravity in my mental map of Boston. Its presence feels like a sign of gentrification, but I’ve only ever encountered it in neighborhoods that were egregiously overpriced to begin with—Downtown, Back Bay, Cambridge, the Seaport. It is the most corporate of all non-corporate coffee shops, the most gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss of all non-gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss cafes, the one most likely to survive the apocalypse. Once local to Copley Square (the artsy, hipster neighbor to the finance bro Prudential Center and the NIMBY ‘feminist’ Newbury Street), now Tatte springs into existence fully formed and functionally identical, local to nowhere, loyal to nothing. In short, it contributes nothing to the grand romance of The Coffee Shop, that mythical fairyland where baristas’ canned bubbliness erupts just spontaneously enough to feel genuine, where the menu rotates just enough for you to notice their clapback to the pumpkin spice latte, where the music is just the right kind of vaguely familiar to make it yours.

That’s the beauty of it. When you walk into a coffee shop, the $6 you pay for your latte also covers the aesthetic, the brand loyalty, the illusion that you matter. My girl Tatte, on the other hand, seems like she should ask how I’m doing but never does. The Tatte outside South Station washes my face away in a tide of dead-eyed commuters. The Tatte at Northeastern dismisses me as one of many fungible college students in a generic extracurricular hoodie. The Tatte by the ICA doesn’t even wish me a pleasant trip. Each Tatte and its overworked staff know exactly what they want to know about me, see exactly what they want to see—that is, another masked, formless face; that is, absolutely nothing of importance.

To be clear, I don’t hate coffee shops, or think that friendly baristas and cafe workers are all fakes. And there have been moments where a barista’s kindness—calling me ‘honey,’ for example—has followed me through an entire day, even week. I’m under no illusions that this barista will remember me or that my imprinting on kind strangers is anything but strange. But I also know that being hailed this way is contingent on pitching my voice up, smiling extra brightly, putting a little bounce in my step, on being a person you would call ‘honey.’ Everyone who has ever had more than one conversation with me knows that this is a lie, but also not a lie: that ‘honey’ is a self I can slip into with a little bit of effort if I know the rules of the interaction require it. Standing in the Tatte line (there’s always a line at Tatte), I mentally rehearse my ‘honey’ self the same way I rehearse my order. And I can tell the cashier— usually no more than 30 years old, clean and pressed in their black shirt and apron—is rehearsing theirs too. I did it all the time when I worked in a cafe myself.

To be clear, I don’t think I’m a fake, either. Just a serious introvert who survives social interactions by reading, pre-reading, and rereading the room. In everyday life I wear many faces for many people, become whoever I need to be for friends, teammates, professors, strangers. In everyday life, among familiar people, these faces must have depth, dimension, consistency; they require a full-body effort to inhabit and a constant consciousness of how I inhabit the space around me. When I’m alone at a coffee shop, I’m there to exit that bodily performance, the responsibility of coherence. I can get away with this because any interactions I have at the shop were transactional from the start and everyone knows it. No one expects ‘realness.’ So long as I’m not intruding on others’ space, I will simply be left alone.

This relation gets dicey sometimes at other indie coffee shops, where the rules of the interaction shift too easily into pretending the interaction is not transactional. My deathless, depthless girl Tatte offers many things—a less corporate alternative to the Starbucks next door, at least—but she has never pretended to be anything more than she is. A social space, an affective space, perhaps, but still a shop.

There’s a common line of critique in all of this, in that paying to exist in public nowadays is kind of fucked, paying to feel spontaneously cared for by strangers is even more fucked, and constantly guessing at how I need to behave in public to appear human has fucked up my sense of self. My $6 latte isn’t correcting this. But when I visit my girl Tatte, my best girl Tatte, at least I know exactly who I’m supposed to be. What I’m paying for in Tatte isn’t love, or a personality, but a chance to experience their absences. In the latest iteration of our capitalist nightmare, where all public existence means an elaborate social dance, I pay Tatte for the chance to be nothing at all.

KATHERINE XIONG B’23 does not exist.