My great love is no more

After my own birthday is my favourite day of the year. That's because we always celebrated it big, with debilitating gifts and long poems. Christmas we always neglected a bit, especially when it came to presents. Except in 2007, when my father gave me a big suit. It was a suitcase. A shiny suitcase with panther print.

Truth be told, at first I thought “hmm.” The Kof has quite a high ordi content of it is, as mentioned, shiny and features a kek print, which would not look out of place with deep orange skin and dead blonde hair. And even my father was a bit nervous about this purchase, and finally gave in because the shop assistant assured him that if I really found it spiteful, the case could of course be exchanged for a slightly more chaste version.

But actually liked that suitcase me did. The first trip came a few weeks after that when I went to celebrate New Year's Eve in London with friends. There's no denying that there were some scowls when I rolled my new showpiece there, and I wasn't quite at ease in London itself either. But gradually we grew closer and closer, and over the past few years Kof has seen quite a few airports and luggage rooms.

New York, Canada, Tuscany, Paris, Cape Verde Islands, Ibiza, London, Berlin, Dublin, Antwerp, Monaco - the Kof brought my stuff everywhere. I now love that thing because, firstly, its silly print makes it easy to spot on the baggage carousel and, secondly, because I soon found that same silly print not silly at all, but very cool. Who has a suitcase like that! We really started to belong together even.

But during our trip through Canada, it started messing around a bit. The base it rests on was loose, but that was still solvable with a big slice of duct tape. We went from Niagara Falls to Toronto and ended in Algonquin Park before arriving back in Amsterdam by plane. Once it arrived in front of my house, I dragged it up three floors with a lot of fuss and then, inevitably, things go wrong.

Just after entering, its handle breaks off. Just so snap hup broken. I tried to save it but it was already over and done with because there were weird big pins sticking out of it and pieces fell off immediately on all sides. My heart broke into as many pieces because, as I told you here, I can get quite attached to non-living things and this suitcase and I had been together for such a long time, this really is the end of an era.

When I my father told this fateful story, he immediately said, “Well then you'd better buy a new suitcase soon and throw this one away.” So that jarred for a moment. “Throw it away! Are you out of your mind? I'm not going to let poor beautiful Kof rot away on the streets alone, am I? No way, she's going up in your attic.” This is an ongoing discussion because I don't think my father is very keen on storing broken suitcases in his attic, but hell no, I'm putting it out on the street.

For now, I just want to take the moment to thank Kof immensely for all the services rendered. And no worries, I will arrange for an appropriate final resting place.