In summer, where I come from, freedom keeps strict opening hours.
It begins roughly when the alarm does not ring for work and ends late in the afternoon, when thousands gather towels, children, coolers, umbrellas, and whatever dignity remains after eight hours sweating beside perfect strangers.
Then everyone gets back into the car.
Everyone heading the same way.
Everyone standing still.
It is the great Sunday exodus, only with fewer prophets and many more traffic circles.
During the week we lock ourselves inside offices, factories, shops, warehouses, and all those other elegant modern variations on the cage. We produce. Reply. Deliver. Pretend to care during conversations we will forget before reaching the parking lot.
Then the weekend arrives and someone, somewhere, gives the signal.
*The sea.*
And we leave.
It does not matter that there is only one decent road to get there, probably designed when the local population consisted of one hundred and fifty people, three bicycles, and a particularly ambitious cow. We all squeeze into it, lined up with windows closed and air-conditioning aimed at our faces, ready to spend two hours in traffic to earn the privilege of lying eighteen inches from a family playing music through a phone.
Freedom, evidently, requires a reservation.
And let me be clear: I go to the beach.
I love it.
It is close, relatively inexpensive, and possesses that magnificent ability to make your life seem larger than the parking lot where you left the car. I go with friends. Have a drink. Laugh. Get in the water. Look at women, because I am still alive and see no convincing reason to pretend otherwise.
I feel good.
And that is exactly the problem.
Because the mechanism works.
The sea welcomes you even when you arrive furious after an endless line of traffic. It does not ask for your résumé, want to know your income, or care that Monday morning will return you to a place you hate. It does what it has always done: moves back and forth with an almost offensive calm while we agitate on the shore like ants convinced the world depends on their emails.
On the beach, we are all there.
Bodies cooked by the sun.
Screaming children.
Couples with nothing left to say but still owning two adjacent loungers.
Young people photographing themselves having fun, because fun without evidence now looks almost illegal.
Middle-aged men staring toward the horizon, bellies finally free from belts, meetings, and manners.
For a few hours, we look alive.
Or at least offer a fairly convincing imitation.
The curious thing is that we call all this “escape.”
The word is perfect.
Because one always escapes from something.
A prison.
A responsibility.
A life we built with such care that we feel compelled to flee it the moment we receive forty-eight hours of leave.
And so an inelegant question arises naturally: if every week we desperately wait to escape our life, perhaps Monday is not the problem.
Perhaps the life is.
But thoughts like these ruin a tan, so it is better to order another spritz and discuss the weather.
Meanwhile, the afternoon slips away.
The crowd occupies every foot of sand like a disorganized army. You walk dodging balls, strollers, flip-flops, dogs, street vendors, and old people advancing toward the water with the determination of those who have defeated worse problems.
From a distance it almost resembles a city built in a few hours.
A city without walls, however.
Or perhaps with invisible ones.
Umbrella number nineteen. Lounger number twenty-two. Paid parking. Lunch at one. Leave before traffic becomes impossible—which is precisely when another fifty thousand people have the same brilliant idea.
We are free, of course.
Free to choose where in the funnel we will wait.
Then dusk arrives.
And that is when the sea becomes truly beautiful.
When people begin leaving, voices drop, and the beach slowly returns everything it swallowed during the day. Footprints remain, collapsed castles, abandoned holes, forgotten bottles, and a few couples walking at the water’s edge while pretending not to know that this moment too will end.
The kiosks close.
The flags keep moving.
The water reclaims the space we had lent it.
And the place that only minutes earlier was suffocating beneath bodies, noise, and sunscreen suddenly becomes immense again.
Almost empty.
Almost sincere.
It is a brutal transformation.
By day, the beach resembles a fairground for the human species. At sunset, it reminds us that not a fucking thing will remain of all that commotion.
The sea was there before us.
It will be there afterward.
We are only the afternoon shift.
And as the last people gather their things and head for the cars, the ritual of return begins.
The lines.
The horns.
A child asleep in the back seat.
Sand everywhere.
The radio already discussing the coming week, because even on Sunday night someone feels compelled to remind you that your leave is nearly over.
Monday we will return to our stations.
Put closed shoes back on.
Turn on the computers.
Ask our colleagues how the weekend was, and they will answer “good” with the polite resignation of someone who knows the question requires no truthful response.
Then we will wait again.
For next Friday.
Next summer.
The next escape.
Perhaps there is nothing wrong with it.
Perhaps life is also this: enduring certain cages through the promise of a few hours before the sea. Not everyone can quit everything, buy a boat, and become a mysterious tanned man in his forties with a past no one dares ask about.
I, for one, will keep going.
I will keep cursing in traffic and, the moment I see the water, forget almost everything.
Because the sea is a magnificent son of a bitch.
It knows perfectly well that we will return.
No matter how crowded the beach, how long the road, or how absurd it is to compress the idea of freedom between a tollbooth and a parking lot.
We will return because even packed shoulder to shoulder before that blue expanse, we can still feel something resembling space.
And perhaps it is not much.
Perhaps it is only a well-packaged break before returning to normal.
But when the sun drops, the crowd disappears, and only wind, waves, and a few last figures remain on the shore, for one moment you find yourself thinking that a way out really exists.
The problem is that by Monday morning, we no longer know where the fuck we saw it.