Akashic Coffee

Victoria Mendoza pushed the door open to Akashic Coffee, the chime overhead a soft whisper against the hush of coastal morning. The air inside was steeped in espresso and wood smoke, the soundscape a mixture of lo-fi beats and soft laughter from other early risers. It was one of those San Luis Obispo mornings when the fog still hugged the mountains, reluctant to leave.

She wore a navy hoodie emblazoned with the worn-out letters CAL POLY across the front and carried her laptop bag like a shield. Her senior year had begun just weeks ago, and already the pressure to define her life had crept into her bones. She was an architecture major, but her passion? Still undefined.

Victoria approached the counter. The barista—a quiet man with honey-colored eyes and a long braid—smiled warmly.

“What can I get started for you?” he asked.

“Just a black coffee, please. Light roast if you’ve got it.”

He nodded and got to work. When he returned, he handed her a steaming paper cup, the sleeve rough under her fingers.

"One light roast. Today’s special blend is Third Door," he added with a wink, which struck her as oddly theatrical. “Enjoy.”

She turned to find a table when something on the cup caught her eye. The sleeve was imprinted with intricate designs—almost mandala-like—but what drew her attention was the text along the rim of the cup. It wasn’t in English.

Victoria squinted. It looked like Devanagari, the script used for Sanskrit and Hindi. Her minor in Global Studies and a semester abroad in Jaipur made the characters vaguely familiar. She traced them with her finger. The words shimmered strangely, then translated in her mind like a whisper she hadn't heard in years:

“Go to office hours today. One will open the door.”

A chill danced across her shoulders. She looked back at the barista—but he was gone, replaced by a different person entirely. Her cup, though, was still warm in her hands. She sat.

The Professors

Later that morning, Victoria walked across campus, her boots clicking against the concrete, the cup still in her hand. She stared at it as she walked, turning it slowly.

"One will open the door."

She had three professors whose office hours overlapped that afternoon. All were options for her senior project advisor.

Professor Carlton was the business-minded architect—sleek, expensive glasses, a passion for “designs that maximize economic efficiency.” He had recently published a book titled Architecture as Asset: The Blueprint of Capital. Victoria had taken two of his classes. He was brilliant. Ruthlessly so.

Professor Langley was the traditionalist. Her lectures emphasized structural integrity, permanence, the "immovable dignity" of concrete. She once told a class, "Buildings are like laws. If they change too often, civilizations fall." Victoria respected her—but the thought of asking her to mentor a creative, world-spanning project felt…limiting.

Then there was Professor Saajan Mehra.

He was soft-spoken, Indian-American, often wore linen jackets and walked barefoot around the design lab. Rumor had it he’d worked with the U.N. on post-conflict reconstruction in the Middle East and had designed a peace pavilion in Cyprus that used glass from both Turkish and Greek sources. His work was poetic, almost mythic.

She hadn't spoken to him more than twice.

Doors

That afternoon, she stood under the archway between Engineering North and the Design Commons. A warm breeze played with the hem of her skirt.

Her phone buzzed. A reminder from her calendar:

3:15 PM - Office Hours - Choose

She walked, cup in hand.

She passed Professor Carlton's door first. His office was made of glass and steel; the kind of place where decisions were signed in gold pens. Through the window, she could see a student gesturing nervously as Carlton scribbled on a whiteboard, drawing what looked like a profit curve.

Next was Professor Langley. Her door was open. Inside, architectural blueprints hung like scrolls. The smell of old paper and graphite floated out like ghosts. She was drinking tea from a porcelain cup, flipping through a student’s design portfolio with her ever-present red pen.

Then—down the hallway, around a corner she’d never noticed—she found Professor Mehra’s door.

It wasn’t marked. No nameplate. Just a small brass handle shaped like an infinity symbol. The hallway here was silent, bathed in amber light from a skylight overhead.

Victoria hesitated. Then knocked.

The door creaked open.

Inside was a room unlike any she'd seen on campus. It looked more like a study in some ancient library—books in different languages stacked in pyramids, walls covered in maps with fabric swatches pinned to them. In the center, a table with a clay model of a circular building—open-roofed, surrounded by symbols etched into the clay like runes.

Professor Mehra looked up from a leather-bound notebook. His smile was slow, kind.

"Victoria Mendoza," he said, as if he’d been expecting her. "Come in. You got the message, didn’t you?"

She stared at him. “What—how do you know?”

“The cup,” he said simply. “Akashic Coffee. I used to work there, years ago. It's a...special place. Doors open through cups more often than people realize.”

Victoria stepped inside, and the door clicked shut behind her.

The Project

Professor Mehra gestured to the clay model.

"I'm gathering proposals from students with eyes for the invisible—those who can design more than structures. We’re building a peace edifice. A monument built not for power, not for commerce, but for unity."

He slid a folder toward her.

Inside: a page titled Project Aikyam — Sanskrit for “Unity.”

Below that, a proposal:

Senior Thesis Option: Design and develop a modular peace structure sourced from symbolic contributions—cloth, stone, metal—from as many nations as will participate. Each piece will be embedded into the final design. The form is open. The message is not: Together.

He looked at her.

“I want you to be the lead designer. You’ll need to contact embassies, cultural councils, refugee artists—anyone who has something to offer. But more importantly… you’ll need to decide what peace looks like.”

Victoria blinked. The room was suddenly warm. Her mind reeled.

“I don’t know if I’m the right person for this.”

“You drank the coffee,” he said gently. “You chose to listen.”

Conflict

For the next week, Victoria couldn’t sleep.

Her other professors reached out. Carlton sent an email with subject line:

“High-Return Project Ideas for Mendoza: Senior Year”

Langley left a voicemail inviting her to consult on a city expansion proposal, saying, “This could define your early career.”

Everyone wanted something that made sense on paper. But Mehra’s project asked something else.

One night, her roommate asked, “So are you building, like, a utopia or something?”

And Victoria, staring at her laptop, surrounded by swatches sent from Estonia, Tunisia, and Peru, said quietly, “I think I’m building… a door.”

Fabric and Firelight

Months passed.

Victoria became a bridge. She wrote emails in five languages, Skyped with schoolchildren in Sierra Leone who wanted to contribute a flag patch, and unwrapped delicate silk sent from a small peace group in Kashmir. One box contained a single, hand-painted feather. Another a strip of barbed wire melted and reformed into a spiral.

The structure she designed was circular, open-roofed, like the one Mehra had shown her—but made of translucent panels, each embedded with the material from a different nation. By day, it shimmered like stained glass. By night, it glowed.

At the final review panel, Professors Carlton and Langley sat in silence as she presented.

Carlton cleared his throat. “Beautiful. But impractical.”

Langley added, “It’s symbolic. But where’s the utility?”

Professor Mehra leaned forward. “Peace is the utility.”

The Real Door

The structure was never built on campus. Too controversial. Too abstract.

But word spread.

A year later, after graduation, Victoria got a call—from UNESCO. Then from a design collective in Copenhagen. Then from a woman named Laila in Beirut who said, “We’ve saved a space for something like this.”

Now, Victoria travels. Not to chase money, but to gather pieces. She builds peace, one thread at a time.

And in every new country, she finds a local café. Orders a black coffee. And checks the cup.

Just in case.