I.

They have beaches in cities. Not only in cities. They have them in other places too. Like, you can go down to Costa Rica or fly up to Queensland or book a diving trip to the Philippines and find beaches there that aren't in cities. Those ones will most probably be an empty square of sand, hidden behind a wide stretch of moss-covered rocks holding up bent-over palms. They see no cars nor buildings nor Parking Inspectors nor small, fluffy white dogs on long leashes nor any of the General Public. You can sit on them and pretend your stories are someone else's. You can dream up new ones to tell in bed under the air-conditioner on a Sunday morning in the middle of a heatwave.

I grew up in a city that had beaches. Those are the ones I know best. The water is a little dirtier and the sand a little coarser. There are park benches, blue-stone walls, divided walking paths, wide-open spaces, manicured strips of grass and always a solid, tarred road running defiant along the outside. The sound of the rushing cars is similar to that of the crashing waves and you are left with a surround-sound effect.

I go to beaches to escape. I look out at the water and there is more distance than I can see. I like knowing that there is more than I can see. More out there than I can tell. It calms me in the moments I cannot imagine what there would be if there were no longer you. But on a city beach there is all that City Life going on around me and I'm never able to escape far enough. I'm tranquil and away and then I'm disturbed and I'm back.

They put a skate park in at the beach in St Kilda. The space it went into wasn't being used anyways. Now they come down there and roll around and kick boards.

She was there watching her son. I never got the full story. I heard it in broken up bits and incomplete details. My impression was that when she was eighteen she moved from Malaysia with her new husband. They were forced into the marriage by their parents and both were looking for a way out. The plan was to come to Australia and break off into separate and separated lives. Then she fell pregnant. Sometimes couples still have sex whilst trying to get away from each other.

They stuck together for a while trying to raise the little boy, but that was never going to work. He took full custody and she dropped by for visits. She professed love and loyalty to the kid. To me anything you do once a month seems like guilt and feels like a shame. But her burden and consequence wasn't mine and my assessments here may read well, but they are - at best - fiction. Besides, like I said before, I never really had all the facts.

I never found out what she was escaping from. It wasn't the obvious stuff. The kid. The ex-husband. The family far away, yet still present. That was all obvious stuff to escape, but none of those were it. She didn't want me to ask and I never did. It's hard to know someone when you don't know what they are trying to escape from. That was probably the whole point - she didn't want me to get to know her.

II.

Santa Monica beach is broad and flat. There is a huge expanse of space running between the water's edge and the road's edge. That road is six lanes wide and flows with thick traffic no matter the time. If someone were to think of looking for you down at the beach, you'd be able to see them coming. If you sat close enough to the water, you could see them in the distance waiting for a break in the cars to get across the road. Then they would have to slowly slog across seventy five meters of white sand shifting under their feet the whole time. All this would leave you with plenty of time to get away.

He moved to LA from England five years earlier. From up near Surrey, I believe. He produced segments for local TV news reports there. The weatherman reporting from the annual flower show. A live feed from a horse race. An outside broadcast of election results. That sort of thing. He was due three months leave and he scored another three and split for Southern California. He wanted the type work that he could impress girls with.

He got to town and feel in love right away. Not with the place - with a girl. She was from Connecticut and had also just moved West. She had an online business home-delivering baskets of vegan cookies and cakes. She had a dedicated customer following among some famous young actors. A gossip magazines had done a couple of paragraphs about her business and it suddenly blew up. Orders were coming faster than she could keep up with. She hired some more staff and moved the whole operation out to California, where the bulk of these new regular orders were coming from.

They moved through the early stages fast. They were close and constant from the first day. They felt loyal and bound before he even knew what she liked to drink. The reasons for their instant and intense connection he never explained. I don't think he ever knew. Who does know such a thing? We fall in love because we do. The reason isn't important. All that is important is when it starts and when it ends and who is the first to know each of those things.

They'd wake up in the mornings by each other's side and feel confused by the ease of it all. They'd cover that anxiety with a leap straight into groggy conversation. Her mind wasn't fully awake yet and the first sentences out of her mouth seemed to skip a paragraph or two that should have come before. Out of context, these sentences sounded like lost catchphrases. They'd both laugh at them and then he'd type them into his phone, joking that one day he'd start selling T-Shirts with her phrases printed on them.

And that's what he did now. She sold cookies online and he sold T-Shirts. Her business was doing a lot better than his, but he was still busy enough to kinda forget why he had first come over. Everyday, he would come down to the water's edge and try to escape the same thing he wanted to run towards. He would never swim, though. He never brought a towel.

III.

I'm not sure you can call Brighton, in England's South, a 'city'. That would be up to you to decide. But the beach there sure feels like a City Beach to me. There's no sand. Just little rocks instead. So you end up standing just beyond the road's edge staring out at the broken, brown water. It is always windy there and it rains most every day. You need to work out which way the wind is blowing and then you know which side of shelter to stand on.

There are times when you think you've fallen out of love, but you actually haven't. And some of those times, you are lucky enough to realise. These are the times you have to fly back to England. Brighton is the correct place to start - or re-start. You can fly into Heathrow, where she is waiting. Then, together you can catch the train to directly down to the coast and go straight from the train station to the store to buy yourself a heavy, warm coat. From there it is a short, arm-in-arm amble straight down the hill to the beach.

                                      _______

You can escape alone or together. You can escape to or from. You can plan for an escape or regret not taking one. You can escape all the cars or escape in one. You can escape forever or not at all. You can escape your past. You can escape someone else's past. You can escape all your financial entanglements.

You can escape a screen. You can escape a tag. You can escape the hold your escape has over you. You can escape to the other side. You can escape to where they know you are, but will never find you. You can escape to where you have never been. And you can escape even just to the next station up the line.

You can do it all.

For even cities have beaches.