Rêveuse

Chapter 28.

February 2025

In January, I booked my first volunteer trip. I wanted to do something that was useful. I had seen many parts of the world, selfishly only for my own pleasure, and I needed to do something that would benefit other people than myself. It was easy to convince Evie with her big heart to come with me. For a month we prepared for it before boarding the plane to Sri Lanka to help 20 other people teach children, nuns and monks English, while also helping the sea turtles.

Before leaving, I applied to summer classes at an American university. Evie would spend the summer in Los Angeles doing some dancing gigs again. That way we could spend some time there together, like we had before my injury. I wasn't sure if I would get in, but it was worth a try. My grades weren't amazing, but I had the money to pay for it and wrote letters to the schools. It was just summer classes anyway. But first we were spending three months away.

We came to Sri Lanka and got our rooms assigned. They were shared with other volunteers and were very simple. No air conditioning, water should not be drunk from the tap, thin mattresses in the beds. But I was okay with all of that. I was there to help people in need.

The first day, we were introduced to the others and then shown around where we'd be working and around Colombo. It was a beautiful place, and there was a nice beach to surf on while we had some time off.

The second day we were off to work. We started by watching while they took care of hurt sea turtles, protected their eggs and made sure the new babies could make it safely to shore. Seeing the babies crawl out of their shells was one of the coolest and most wholesome things I've seen. We helped scare off the birds to make sure the turtle babies could make it into the water.

The third day we were introduced to a group of children in a school and we got to follow them for a day. We saw them do their school work, we noticed they teach dance in schools and I was in awe of the beauty of the way they danced. The fourth day it was our turn to teach the same group of children English with activities, accompanied by a teacher that could translate for the students in case they didn't understand.

Days went on and we spent our days between the beach, a veterinary clinic and schools. I adored working with the kids and it was fascinating working with the turtles. We had the weekends off where we explored and went surfing, or went out with the other volunteers. We made friends with the others, especially the girls we shared a room with.

Time sort of disappeared over there. We did things we enjoyed and we did something that helped other people. I didn't even think of home.

—

March 2025

"Are you sure?" Evie asks, and I nod my head, looking at myself in the mirror.

She picked up the scissors and she cut off exactly where I showed her, right above my shoulder. My hair had previously gone down my back, reaching almost all the way to my ass. But it was getting difficult to deal with and it was too hot to have it down but it was annoying to deal with my hair every morning. So I decided to get rid of it. I knew Pascale wouldn't be happy, she's always done my hair, dyed it and cut it. She's always loved my long hair and ordered me not to cut it.

A few days earlier I had dyed Evie's hair darker. She had been blonde when she was younger but her hair got darker as she grew older, and it was annoying keeping up with the salon visits to keep it blonde. She got sick of it, and she trusted me to dye her hair brown for her. Darker than her natural color even. My mom would call it rebellion, but she's a little old school like that and thinks that what you do with your hair matters more than it does. Evie's mom loved it though, it made her look more like her rather than her dad.