beautiful life • billie eilish

[36] happier than ever

Ezra pov

What is happiness?

To me, it's a subjective concept. It's not universal for everybody, because everyone experiences happiness in multiple, different, and complex ways. To me happiness is being surrounded by family, friends – people that you actually care about, and that care about you – but it is also dancing, and riding horses, and feeling the sun on my skin and smelling the grass after a rainy day.

So, the last few days in Dubai have been perfect! The whole process of getting to Dubai was... a real pain! A negative test before boarding the plane, plus a five-hour layover in Qatar, where you couldn't even leave the airport, plus all the bureaucracy of arriving in Dubai and having to do another PCR test, and basically be a recluse in your hotel room until the result came through! If your test came back negative, you were free to roam around and enjoy Dubai, but if your test came back positive, you had to do a fourteen-days quarantine before making another PCR test. Luckily for me, mine came back negative, same as Natalya, Yuna, Claire and Kyle.

Claire is a 21 years-old girl from France. Well, she's actually half-Australian and half-French, like her twin sister Desiree. Even though they are twins, they are completely different, both physically and mentally. Claire, with long light brown hair and bright blue eyes, is more outgoing, chatty, confident, and sure of her actions, while Desiree, with curly, shoulder length brown hair and brown eyes, is more introvert, she only talks when she's talked to, and she doesn't appear to be as confident as her sister. From what I remember, Claire is a spitting copy of their mother and Desiree is a spitting image off their father.

Claire and Desiree have been staying together in LA, in an apartment they got right before things took a turn with covid-19, so when Claire's test came back negative, but Desiree's came back positive it was a little weird.

Gio and Nicolás tests also came back positive so, like Claire, they had to stay in their rooms, quarantining before they took a new one on the fourteenth day. Since the two met, Gio and Kyle have been inseparable. When Covid hit, Gio had no choice but to stay in LA, like all the others so, because aunt Sarah was more than happy to, she stayed in Kyle's house. I think that made their relationship even better. Honestly, now they act like a sweet old couple that went through a lifetime together. Weird, but sweet.

Nicolás, or Nico as we call him, was the last one to join the group. He's a Spanish dancer, and the Company found him through a studio he rented to shoot his dance videos for YouTube. Nico is a sweet, caring guy. He always put others above himself. Around last month, when people finally were able to have a quarantine bubble, Nico and Mina finally got together! It took them long enough...

A quarantine bubble or pod basically meant that you could have a group of people form their own little social group, by following the quarantine rules but still getting social interactions beyond your household. So that's when we all started to get together once again, at my house – it was the one with the most space for so many people.

For some reason, Kaia and Jackson couldn't board on the same flight as us, because of some passport problem, so they would be here later on. Even though she has been living for some years in Russia, Kaia still has Indian passport and ID, so her boarding on the plane was recused. Same goes to Jackson. He's from the Philippines and the validation date on his passport had already passed! That meant that he had to catch a flight back home to take care of it, before joining us in Dubai.

***

The hotel was out of this world. Since we got here, we were all talking about using the outdoor pool – they also had an indoor pool - so, those that were able to roam around, Kyle, Yuna, Nat, Claire, and I, decided we had to give it a try.