To prepare for Evacuation Day, set out the outfit I’ll pull on fast, gather what I can’t let go of into my survival backpack, the handful of my children’s baby teeth in the zipper pouch I saved them in, stamped Khanna Jewelers, Khanna Bhawan, Bank Street, Karol Bagh, N. Delhi, resting in the tiny drawer of an intricately carved Japanese jewelry box, leftovers from my ex-life with the son of a diplomat. From the time before the words she said to me last stood stiff in the vase of my memory, “Hello? Hello?”—silence on the line— and I started surrounding myself with reminders of loves gone by, like a person sitting on the sidewalk amidst her trashbags, begging for her right to remain. We old

colorize our black-and-white pasts so in the recesses of our brains they take on a glow, so phrases tossed out way back when emerge in a chemical bath, the way pictures came gradually clear in days gone by. If the old one wrests himself free from the polarities: predator/prey, suffering/joy, that pin his arms to his sides and hobble his gait, if he’s free to run up and down the spectrum, a renegade laughing and carrying on— “Never surrender!” he cries to the smoke-filled air.

I’m used to drawing out the hardest stories, bringing them to my face but no one else likes their breath snatched. “So tether yourself! Adjust your eyes to the lenses!” Let stone after stone in the edifice of my life liquify and evaporate, like souls leaving, turning their bodies to meat. I’m used to telling

how we were a couple ecstatic about getting into things— bed, marriage, costumes, debt. How a day would come in—Hello!—and we’d get into it. How a day would sail out like a steamship. “This is the last stop on this day!” the announcer would pompously bellow. “Everyone please leave this day!” We old have stowed away in the corners of days that returned to the port. The question pulls on the old blankets of consciousness we’re hiding under, that the young party to avoid noticing: if you’re neither predator nor prey what are you? The delusion—“My brain is a new thing under the sun”—takes its leave. The time to fly is coming, from the nest of the things assuring me that I’ve lived.