Assignment: 5-minute Warm-up Exercise – You wake up in someone else’s body. What happens? What do you do? (Remember, this is a timed exercise, untweaked, just as it flowed out of my fingertips…Excuse all typos, spelling and grammar mistakes, etc.)

I woke slowly, wondering why I felt so strange. The air in my lungs felt too warm, too much, like over-inflated balloons ready to pop. I blinked my eyes open and saw not the ceiling above my bed, but a vault of wood arching overhead. Where was I? I sat up. My head reeled, then righted itself, and I climbed out of the huge bed—definitely not my own narrow daybed—and kept on going up. And up. So high I got dizzy looking down.

This was not my 5’2” stature, here. Everything seemed too far away, like my head was in the clouds. What? How? I spotted a mirror and shuffled over to it, afraid to trust legs that didn’t feel as though they belonged to me. And screamed.

The face looking back at me: Male. Black. With dreads snaking around high cheekbones. Chiseled lips three times the size they should be. Scary-shiny mahogany skin.

What the? I looked down. Well-developed pecs, some chest hair, flat abs, like a washboard. I looked lower, to the bulge between my legs. Hmmm, I thought. Walking should be fun.