The rest have left long before. It was only Anthony, Chris, Ashley, Sam and I sitting back in our chairs, listening to Bridget and Aparna playing piano and violin respectively. I don’t remember what the composition was or even the composer. Not that it mattered, for this evening I listened to how somewhere in a house hidden in a corner of this enormous, ungraspable and barren world, two musicians played music for five ordinary men. Just for them, maybe for themselves or probably for the music alone. Not that it mattered, for all my sensations and, as I then realized, childish and trifling thoughts, obsessions, anxieties and the rest that our mind tortures us with, began melting away into the music, leaving me the way dirty water leaves city sewers to become sunlit clouds. I closed my eyes and only one thing still kept me with myself. It was a question “Does this house have a number?”

Tear the walls down to the earth,
Mix their rubble with the dirt,
Crush the cities into dust,
Wipe it off this planet’s crust.

This is what we do
in this unnumbered house
Breaking down in our minds
when our demons we arouse
That now kiss our tired feet
and hold tight to our palms
And sing softly to our scared souls
their wildest muted psalms.

When we’re running from our shadows,
when we’re swallowing their light
Scattered pieces of the sunshine
underneath our bare feet bite.
Strangest visions, dreams of escape
into darkened rooms divide
This abandoned still unnumbered
house where from the light we hide.

Unnumbered house,
the only building that yet stands.
All else gone; all else torn
and worn down into sand
Numbered with the footprints
of our everrunning feet.
Unnumbered house -
in this desert sole retreat.

Bridget and Aparna ended playing long before I realized it. I remember only ripping through an enormous distance Anthony’s thanking and goodnights, replied with Aparna’s “all apologies”. None of them knew that three and a half months later I stood by the just built gate of that house, staring through the midnight moonlight at a little wooden plank displaying with white paint the number 151. Not that it mattered.