I woke to the sound of my own breath, sharp and unfamiliar.
The air felt thin in my chest. My hand brushed across my face and froze—softer skin, smaller nose, a jawline that wasn’t mine. I stumbled from the bed, tripping over the sheets, and lunged toward the mirror on the wall.

A stranger stared back at me.
Long black hair where my close-cropped cut should’ve been. Eyes larger, softer, framed with lashes I never had. My chest rose and fell under curves I did not understand. I screamed until my throat burned, but the sound—high, shrill—only deepened the terror.

I tore open the door and ran. The apartment complex stairwell echoed with other voices, the same shrieks, cries, curses. Old men clutching at their new bodies, wives clawing at their throats as if choking on their own identities. When I burst into the street, Shanghai was already a storm.

Cars sat abandoned in intersections. A bus had crashed into a storefront, the driver sobbing as people pulled her out. Everywhere, people grabbed at their skin, their hair, their clothes. Some collapsed to the ground in disbelief. Others shouted prayers, or curses, or both.

I ran past a vendor’s stall overturned in the chaos. The woman who had sold dumplings there yesterday now screamed at her reflection in a phone screen. A group of teenagers huddled together, crying, holding one another as if the world had ended overnight. Maybe it had.

I kept running, but there was nowhere to go. Each corner brought more of the same—the same horror painted on every face, the same confusion in every voice.

At last I stopped, chest heaving, tears burning my eyes.
I looked around at the thousands of strangers who were all, somehow, just like me now.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who I am.
But as I stand here in the middle of the world turned upside down, I see them—crying, panicking, clutching themselves just as I do.

I’m not alone.
The world is with me.