??????????

I am numb. My hands are still shaking . . . even though I have “lived” with this for a few hours. I still keep on telling myself that this is a bad dream . . . a nightmare . . . and I am going to wake up soon.

I look down on my hands on the keyboard on this laptop, and the evidence seems all too real. I am an attorney, and I deal in evidence . . . cold hard facts.

The evidence is that my hands are much smaller and finer than they were yesterday, before I went to bed last night. At the end of each finger is a long fingernail, extending about ½ past the pads of the finger. It is hard to type with these finger nails.

The skin on my hands, wrists, and arms is very, very dark.

During the night I have turned into an African-American woman.

I did not mystically wake up somewhere else, into somebody else’s life, like in a bad internet story. I am still in the same room that I rented in the Trading Post Inn, wearing the same clothes I wore to bed (a plaid pair of boxers shorts, and a white, wife-beater, undershirt) last night. So I, somehow, transformed, into another person.

I hear commotion and shouting and running around outside of my door. Maybe I am not the only one. I don’t know. It is hard to the think straight. I am happy that nobody has knocked on my door . . . I would be afraid to answer it. Afraid until I can figure out what is going on.

It’s so hard. I feel so different than I was before.

Then there are the aches and pains that I didn’t have yesterday. It is that pain that woke me up out of my sleep. I have no idea where they came from. All I know is that I have what feel like bruises on both arms, and my right upper leg. My left . . . breast . . . hurts a lot. There is a cut on my forehead near the hairline.

What HAPPENED to me? This is impossible!!!

So many thoughts are going through my head at one time, what caused this, who am I, what am I going to do now . . . .

Then I thought of this blog. Just the act of typing forces me to organize my thoughts, slow me down. Typing with these fingernails slows me down even more. I am making more typos than ever before, and if there are rrors in here, I apologize.

I have to rely upon my experience as an attorney to systematically approach this problem even thought I am under more stress and duress than I can imagine. I do not know if it is me or this body, but I feel like curling back up in the bed and crying. I know that won’t help, so I am trying, very hard, not to succumb to that emotion.

Think your way through this, Paul.

Okay, first step. Assess the situation.

I can call up the mental image of the person I became when I looked into the mirror in the bathroom. I am a black woman now, there is no denying it. My age appears to be anywhere from about 17 years old to about 22 years old. I look young. I would estimate my height to be no more than 5’2”, and weight about 105 lbs. This girl is extremely beautiful for an African-American girl, for than matter, any girl. Her body is, I think the word is, “hot” too.

I can’t tell if the breasts are real or whether this girl went to a plastic surgeon. I am afraid to touch them. They are riding high up on my chest, and seem to be rounder and firmer than what I would expect from real breasts. When I pulled down the boxes to go to the bathroom (the urge was still there), I saw that the groin area was shaved, but there was a two to three day growth of stubble.

As I type this, I look down at the sleeveless shirt I wore to bed last night. The chest of the shirt is pushed out, demonstrating large breasts. I can see the valley of cleavage. The weight feels . . . strange. I can see the outline of large nipples through the thin material of my shirt.

As far as the hair, it was longer, perhaps to my shoulder blades. There was a slight wave, and some reddish-blonde highlights. There was no way that I would be confused for Paul Miller.

I don’t know how I got this way, so the problem of how to get back to myself has to wait for a while.

Now that I am calm, I think the first thing I should do is search the room to see if there are any clues about what’s going on.

The next step is to find out if this happened to anybody else.