Day 4. Going down the hill…#SOL19 #SOLSC

March 4th:

This slice is not about getting older, or maybe it is, but how you do it on a bike.

The first day I went to my writing workshop, Maria, “the beautiful and young instructor” as she likes we call her, asked us to do an automatic writing exercise inspired on Natalie Wolver (sic). This is what I wrote in my notebook. Today I searched the internet to make sure I was referencing it correctly and realized that it was Natalie Goldberg and her famous book Writing down the bones, or perhaps another she wrote about writing.

The exercise consisted on writing without stopping for five minutes in a row. I obediently did it as a good newcomer to the group. And this is what it came to me, literally. I promise, I have not changed anything, not even a period or a comma, well at least in Spanish, because the English version is just a pitiful translation.

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Shit! When she was going down the hill giving all in, since she wanted to break a record in Strava, her new application to measure the speed of her bike, it was a single second, yes, only one, in which she literally left her life and immediately  found herself looking at a truck that was coming at her. Now she really had screwed up. She did not remember anymore. She closed her eyes just as she saw the truck go over her head. Or at least that’s what she believed. And now she was lying, paralyzed, numbed by the events, in a bed that was not her, a black roof through which the beat of a fan could be heard, pained by time. In a corner, spider webs wove comfortably and the walls of the room fell apart. A man in his fifties was taking her pulse and a woman who had not waxed her mustache, was holding a mask. The truth is that she did not know if what she saw was true or she imagined it, because without glasses, that most likely were lying broken on the slope of Guzmán, she couldn´t see a thing. But she was sure her body was alive in a sore bed, she just did not know why.

Now that I visualize how much I wrote, I am not that impress. When I did it, I was very proud and I thought I wrote quite a bit in 5 minutes, but on this blog post, it looks meager.

Here is the original Spanish version

Mierda. Cuando iba bajando la cuesta a todo dar, pues quería batir un record en Strava, su nueva aplicación para medir su velocidad en bici, fue un solo segundo, sí, solo uno, en en el que se le fue literalmente la vida y acto seguido se encontró mirando a un camión que se le venía encima. Ahora sí que la había cagado. Ya no recordaba más. Cerró los ojos justo cuando vió al camión pasar por encima de su cabeza. O por lo menos eso es lo que creyó. Y ahora se encontraba recostada, paralizada, entumecida por los acontecimientos, en una cama que no era la suya, un techo negro por el cual se escuchaba el batir de un ventilador adolorido por el tiempo. En una esquina telas de araña tejían su morada cómodamente y las paredes de la habitación se caían a pedazos. Un hombre de unos cincuenta años le tomaba el pulso y una mujer que no se había depilado el bigote, le sostenía una mascarilla. La verdad es que no sabía si lo que veía era cierto o se lo imaginaba, pues sin gafas, que lo más probable es que yacieran echa trizas en la cuesta de Guzmán, no veía lo que se llamaba un carajo. Pero estaba segura que su cuerpo estaba vivo en una cama adolorida, no sabía bien por qué.

Going downhill near the slope of Guzmán (photo taken from a car though)

Here is the origin of all