I will leave it like this

As a child, I played the piano moderately for years on a large, tattered Kaps from Dresden. The instrument eluded me when I went to college, as it proved impossible to get the thing up the stairs in my first independent home, one of the HAT units in the Boekhoven building on Breedstraat.

The piano was sold to an ex-girlfriend's mother. Occasionally I would still walk in there to see how my old piano was doing, but eventually everyone moved everywhere and the piano slid further away from me through time to places I don't suspect.

There is a poem by K. Schippers that is about losing things. It begins as follows:

You have lent something, you want it back,
a book or is it bamza sticks, you
doesn't get them and you think: I'll leave it like this.

The poem follows things and the poet concludes all sorts of things about things and distance, including that distance from your things is also worth something, that there can be a balance between what you lost and no longer having it in your home. Comfort is a big word in poetry, but the poem applies very well to the vanished Kaps. It ends like this:

... So your ownership over seas and
mountains, you lend, you lose, you can
touching nothing more and you leave it like that. It is
already gathered in the world and why those
casual distance still shrinking in a house.

This summer I wrote a piece on guitars for NRC, in which the piano is mentioned in passing. i received two e-mail messages: one from someone in Utrecht Oost, who had a Kaps that had come into her possession via via via at the same time and under similar circumstances. It's a brand you rarely come across. She drew the obvious conclusion: that must be it. In the photo she sent along, I recognised my piano in every detail. Except for one important point: it was black and not eaten away at the legs by our dog.

The other message came from the ex-girlfriend. My instrument, which is spared nothing in this life, is still serving in the hall of the Geleen Carnival Association after several moves. With that, the distance is clear again, down to the kilometre. I can go there and ask to play. I can not and write a poem about it. Or leave it. Either way, it becomes a matter of subduing.