Every story begins with "Once upon a time..." In our case, every day's stories begin with a phone call. With a voice. Or with a few words, always different, arranged in warm and friendly messages.

Some little girls know exactly which dress is missing from the picture they imagine. Flavia is one of them. Knowing her age, I imagined her even before I saw her, delicate, serene and with sun-kissed hair. Because I thought of this color combination for a certain profile of little girl and, with small, equally adorable exceptions, the recipients of the Girl with a Pearl are the ones in my thoughts.

I received 3 photos one evening. And the message for the contest. Before I read the message, I was moved to tears, seeing the photos of the child I had imagined, wonderfully taken. "On the border between childhood and adolescence is the dress from Sipet de Sadef. The child in Flavia still wants fairy tales, but the adult also demands the right to life. A return to childhood combined with a hope for the future. This was our first experience with this dress, occasioned by the taking of the final photos of the 8th grade. We "flirted" with childhood and looked at life with confidence."

The message, the image, the sincerity in her gaze, made her the absolute winner of the first #Sipetdesidef contest. But she is more than just an ordinary teenager, whose photo has garnered the appreciation of her peers and even those of their parents, friends, or simply anyone who saw beyond the image a beautiful MAN at the beginning of his journey.

She didn't know about the competition beforehand, and that wasn't the purpose of the unique photo shoot. That's how it was meant to be. And it was good. It was a colorful and bright moment in a difficult year, in which she is preparing for the most important exam so far, the high school entrance exam, which she is taking seriously and with determination. For this reason, she has also put (performance) badminton on the back burner, but is aiming for new medals when she is a high school student. But that's not what her parents talk about with pride, or about her school results. Although they would have reason to.

The parents of this bright child are happy that she is healthy. And that (although it is not easy for a parent to always cope!) she refuses to fit into patterns, choosing from the moment she was born to leave her mark on every event, the main character of which is her. And to forge her own path, followed by instinct but always helped by the education she received. She is a good child who brings peace and harmony among her peers, extremely altruistic, choosing to offer her support even if she does not have much time left for herself and her projects. And it is not a quality that is often found lately. Just as you do not meet everywhere, with young people who know exactly how they would like their future to look, relying only on their own strengths. She has a developed artistic sense, paints, works with painstaking and patience all kinds of jewelry and, who knows, after this difficult year, she may manage to work on an entire collection. Which he can sell (to use the money raised for a humanitarian cause, that's how he seems to like it) or simply give it away. If he has time. Because it's possible that he'll get a puppy (which he really wants!), and he'll take up all his free time.

The dress she won as a gift is not for her. Because she already has one. And joy is not joy in its entirety, if you don't share it with another soul (at least). She chose from the beginning to give it to a girl like her, less fortunate, and her colleagues mobilized wonderfully and found her! Coincidentally, she's also a good child. And coincidentally, she's also blonde.

I don't know what filled our souls with more joy? The fact that Flavia's mother discovered us and we slowly arrived, to sit on a branch of her spring, that we found some great parents and wonderful children in Baia Mare or that we are starting to see a light, far away, in the distance, that gives us hope for a better future, thanks to a generation that seems to know what it wants. And an adorable young lady, who chose to wear a diaphanous dress from Sipet de sidef, on the border between childhood and adolescence, for the album that she will carefully place in a mother-of-pearl chest, along with dear things, good thoughts, medals and everything else she will choose to keep over time.