I probably should have never stopped practicing the piano.

My grandma, whom I knew only as “Honey” (because that’s what my Zaide called her), bought me a spinet piano to play when I was at their house. I had an upright at home as well. I was pretty good, and probably could have been good good…but I hated practicing. Oh well. At least I can still read music.

When my friend and colleague, Ben, told me he had started dating a concert pianist, my ears perked up. Now I just need to find a way to get in contact without seeming like a…bad person?

Next thing I know I’m sitting in an apartment in Pantin, (why does everyone have to live in Pantin), saturated from cycling through a massive rainstorm, and Anastasia is making me couscous for lunch. Posters of Miles Davis and Shostakovich tile her walls. We chat, cynically, about both being North Americans, her from Upper Canada, me from Upper-and-to-the-Left USA. I eat the nosh, and she asks if I’d like for her to play something for me.

It’s a rainy, gray day outside.

Nastya plays the piano.

The dark room lights up.

I listen for a to a few pieces, totally in awe. I take photos to try to keep cool. Apparently, according to Nastya, he’s a bit “rusty”. Only she can sense the rust.

At the time, Anastasia was working on her masters. Meeting up again required rescheduling a few times around both of us. On my last morning in Paris, in March of this year, we met up at the closest café that served coffee in the least-Parisian-way possible, so that I could take some more photos before I headed off to the airport to fly back to Denmark.

We loop the block. It’s cold. I take a photo of her standing under the street sign of Rue Sainte-Anastase (the street I have stayed on four times a year for the over a decade of Fashion Weeks). I think I’m clever. We say goodbye, and I turn to walk one direction while she turns the other.

I text her immediately as I walk past a boutique on Rue de Turenne, asking how far away she’s gone, but she says she’s already on the metro home. She offers to come back, but the time is too short for me to make my flight now. The shop is named “Virtuose”. I photograph her there a few months later.

In June we get dinner on some boiling night with Ben and a group of other photographers. At the restaurant there is a guy wearing a Trump hat. Ideally ironically, but you never know, these days.

It gets very special when Nastya’s boyfriend, Benoît, asks me what I’m doing on the night of the 23rd of September. I tell him I’m not yet booked, and he says to block my calendar, Nastya is playing a show with the other half of Duo Shum, her duet partner: Cellist, Lisa Strauss. And I can bring my camera.

I show up to Salle Cortot, a little late, as usual. The venue is filling up, and Ben tells me I should head up to the mezzanine to get the best angles. I lug my gear up the stairs and sit in what must be the squeakiest chair in the hall.

The girls are introduced, the lights dim, and they emerge from the stage door.

The music begins, and it’s like nothing I’ve heard before.

Two moments stand out to me this evening. In the third movement of the Duo’s “Four Cities”, Nastya reaches into the bowels of the grand piano’s soundboard, muting the strings in a way which creates a sound I wasn’t aware could come from a conventional piano. And later in the same piece, as the final note from Lisa’s cello sounds so much like electricity passing through high-voltage lines on an otherwise silent night.

I realize that I barely took any photos compared to what I had anticipated. In fact, the entire evening was drastically different than I anticipated. It was new and exciting and weird and totally not weird at the same time.

I hop on my bike to head home to process the images and the experience. Cycling across Paris’ Right Bank, one is enveloped and attacked by thousands of sounds. Cars fly by, music blasts from the apartment windows. The sounds of another cyclist’s freewheel. People fighting or laughing.

I hear it all.

These familiar sounds as I cross the capital. But in my head, I’m hearing muted strings and trying to fathom how I could have possibly learned a new sound in a city I’ve visited, very likely, over 100 times in my life.