I wake up already displaced.

The body moves before I decide to. Lungs fill with air that doesn’t belong to me, too shallow, too practiced. I feel suspended just behind the eyes, as if I’ve been hung slightly above myself and pushed forward at the same time—watching, steering, never fully touching.

The hands lift. I recognize nothing in them.

The skin is wrong. Not unfamiliar—occupied. Like a coat still warm from the last person who wore it. When I flex the fingers, the motion lags, delayed by a fraction of a second, as if the body must ask permission before obeying me.

I look into a mirror and feel the ground tilt.

Someone else stares back. Their face settles into expressions I didn’t choose. Muscles remember smiles, frowns, habits I never learned. The eyes blink without my consent, carrying a weight behind them that doesn’t match my thoughts. I know, instinctively, that this is not me. The certainty is sharp. Unarguable.

Walking feels like hovering.

Feet touch the floor, but I don’t feel grounded—only guided. Each step pulls me forward while part of me drifts above, watching the motion unfold from a distance. The body knows how to move through space. It avoids obstacles. It turns corners without hesitation. I follow, a quiet passenger in a borrowed shell.

Memories leak in without warning.

A flash of hands gripping a steering wheel at night. The smell of old coffee. The echo of a voice calling this body’s name. They aren’t mine, but they cling to me anyway, ghost-thin and intrusive, like fingerprints left on the inside of my skull. I feel emotions rise that have no source—grief without context, affection without faces, fear rooted in places I’ve never been.

The unsettling part is how complete it all feels.

This body has a history. A rhythm. A gravity. It has been lived in. And for a moment—just a moment—I feel the terrifying possibility that it could live without me noticing the difference.

People speak to me like I belong here.

They recognize this face. Trust it. Their familiarity makes my skin crawl. I answer in a voice that isn’t mine and hear how natural it sounds, how easily the lie passes for truth. No one sees the fracture. No one notices the observer behind the eyes.

As the day stretches on, the boundaries thin.

The body’s instincts bleed into me. I catch myself reaching for things I don’t remember wanting. Reacting before I think. The distance between us narrows, and that frightens me more than the displacement ever did.

By nightfall, I’m exhausted—not in muscle or bone, but in identity.

Lying still, I feel the weight of the body settle back into itself, like something reclaiming its shape. The borrowed skin tightens. The memories quiet. I understand then that I was never meant to inhabit this form—only pass through it.

When I finally wake as myself again, I don’t feel relief.

I feel reverence.

Because now I know how thin the boundary is. How easily a self can be misplaced. And how every body carries a life inside it—deep, layered, unseen—waiting for someone else to feel just how wrong it would be to wear it.