Avignon Almanac II - The Walls
At dawn the walls of Avignon rise in long, pale sweeps of stone, curved and composed and quietly colossal, holding the city in a rough embrace that once meant survival and now feels almost sentimental, and I walk beside them with the early cyclists who skim the perimeter in fluent arcs, their tyres whispering against asphalt while the light stitches itself slowly along battlements that have outlived both fear and fervour.
The walls do not announce themselves. They loom and linger. They are less monument than muscle, less decoration than declaration. Once they braced for siege. Now they frame morning routines, joggers, lovers lingering too long before work, dogs tugging toward parkland beyond the gate. Fortification has softened into atmosphere.
Inside these walls we have begun our own small rituals.
A loaf bought warm from a corner bakery, crust crackling beneath my palm as if it has something to say about belonging. Bananas carried back through streets still silver with early light. The quiet choreography of coffee in a kitchen built before electricity was imagined. Ash half awake at the table, hair unruly, smiling without reason.
Walls, I am discovering, do not only keep out armies. They hold in mornings like this.
Later that day we climbed through the layered authority of the papal palace, stone upon stone upon stone, corridors thick with the residue of decree and doctrine, and in the dimness I found myself imagining a medieval child darting through those cavernous halls, glancing up at painted ceilings heavy with promise and punishment, hearing adult whispers about siege and schism and salvation.
For him, the walls were not picturesque. They were perimeter and prophecy. They told him who was inside and who was outside. They told him safety had weight.
Now I imagine another boy.
A present day child wobbling on a scooter along the interior path while his father jogs nearby, the walls looming above him like oversized guardians, ancient but ordinary, part of the background of his becoming. He will grow up thinking this curve of stone is natural. He will measure his childhood in circuits around battlements that once braced for attack. The walls will not frighten him. They will frame him.
And then there is the third boy.
Lidcombe.
Western Sydney sun bleaching fibro and brick veneer, train lines humming their metallic hymn, fences marking modest backyards where boys learned quickly the rules of masculinity, where difference was noticed before it was named, where softness required strategy. No medieval ramparts. No crenellations. Just the subtle surveillance of neighbours and narrow expectations.
That boy did not grow up inside visible walls.
He grew up inside invisible ones.
Rules about voice and gesture. About how far to lean into your own instincts before someone pushed back. About which parts of yourself were safest kept indoors. Protection there was behavioural. The architecture lived in the body. The perimeter was drawn in muscle memory and moderated tone.
Standing beside these ancient stones, I feel the friction between these three childhoods.
The medieval boy, sheltered from armies but not from plague. The modern Avignon child, cocooned by continuity and cycle paths and the slow confidence of belonging. The Lidcombe boy, constructing private barricades against ridicule and rejection, learning early that the world beyond the fence line could be both thrilling and cruel.
We crossed the river earlier in the week, wind needling our ears, wandering through Villeneuve’s quieter streets, climbing ramparts that offered a view back toward Avignon’s curved certainty. We stood before a pope’s grave, my first encounter with papal mortality, and I felt that peculiar tremor that comes from proximity to power long extinguished. Even those who commission walls cannot outlast earth.
In Tarascon we walked through a castle thick with history and found etched markings left by British prisoners, names scratched by hands that had travelled unwillingly. Here was fortification as incarceration. Protection turned prison. The line between sanctuary and sentence revealed as perilously thin.
Ash stood beside me in the dim light, shoulders almost touching, and we did not speak for a while because sometimes history presses too close to language and you are left with the simple knowledge that walls can cradle and they can crush.
Healing, I am learning, has its own walls.
When you relocate at midlife you tell yourself it is expansion, but it is also enclosure, a deliberate narrowing of stimuli so that you can tend to what has been neglected. A month inside these walls is not retreat from the world but retreat from excess. It is choosing a perimeter so that the interior can be examined without constant assault.
The boy in Lidcombe did not always have that luxury. His walls were reactive, reinforced often. They kept harm out, yes, but they also kept vulnerability in. They were necessary and they were costly.
What do we keep out when we are trying to mend?
Noise. Obligation. The relentless commentary of expectation.
But what do we risk excluding as well?
Spontaneity. Discomfort. The friction that sharpens rather than scars.
Avignon’s walls once bristled with vigilance. Now they protect a feeling more than a threat. A coherence. A slow, circular intimacy. They allow a city to believe itself intact even as weather and tourists and time pass through its gates each day.
I run my hand along the rough surface and feel centuries of erosion, weather wearing away certainty grain by grain, and I realise that even fortification must remain permeable to survive. Weather infiltrates. Time softens. Purpose shifts.
Protection without permeability becomes prison.
Permeability without protection becomes exposure.
The art is in the calibration.
The medieval boy needed stone. The Lidcombe boy needed strategy. The man I am now needs discernment.
The walls remain.
The question is not whether they stand.
The question is what I allow to cross them.