With wanting to focus the narrative and story more on my personal experience, I started a draft of what this story would say and look like.
I struggled with the language because when i write in Spanish I use wordplay frequently, and it is difficult to translate that rhythm to English. For example, the word “miss” in Spanish is “extrañar”, which means both “to miss” and “to think something is odd”. I wanted to start by saying “Manuela extrañaba mucho” which translates to “Manuela missed a lot”. In Spanish that sentence would say that Manuela missed a lot of things and was also thought as strange.
These are a couple of sentences that begin the story:
Manuela missed a lot. She missed the purple flowers, her mother, the color of her bedroom, and the plane flying above her heading towards all those things, she thought. She also missed her father and green tomatoes.
Manuela’s new bed was wide, her coat thick, and her trousers long enough to cover her legs, which happened to also be wide and thick. The view from her new window included one river, two mountains and three or four birds. She didn’t know with certainty because seasons here changed before they could get acquainted.
Maxim Zaragoza 
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