Avignon Almanac V - Stations
The timetable hangs above the platform with the clean authority of secular scripture, columns of departure and arrival arranged in ordered succession as if the future could be consulted like a psalm, and I find myself studying it with the same focus I once reserved for exam timetables and clinic schedules, because there is something profoundly consoling about the idea that movement can be named, that distance can be measured, that elsewhere is not abstract but printed.
At Avignon Centre the platform gathers heat in the late morning, pigeons strutting with bureaucratic entitlement between benches while the metallic lullaby of idling engines hums beneath casual conversation, and when the TER slides in with its blue and silver composure it does so without drama, as if to remind us that modernity, at its most generous, is simply the art of being carried.
Tarascon was first.
The castle rising from the Rhône like a clenched fist of stone, the etched names of British prisoners carved into interior walls with a desperation that still trembles in the grooves, and the train ride there felt less like tourism than confrontation, because the rails delivered us directly to a site where walls meant incarceration rather than intimacy.
Nîmes came next, its Roman precision unapologetic, geometry asserting continuity in pale stone, and I watched the landscape flatten and fold through the carriage window while thinking about endurance as design, about what survives not because it resists change but because it adapts to it.
Arles followed, sun struck and stern, the amphitheatre heavy with history and controversy, and as we returned to Avignon in the late afternoon light I felt the subtle pleasure of outward expansion followed by deliberate return, the rhythm of leaving and coming back etched into the body like breath.
The TER rhythm is exacting without being oppressive, doors hissing open and closed, announcements delivered in tones that assume compliance, and I realise that much of my life has been structured by platforms.
In Lidcombe the train was not lifestyle but lifeline.
Every weekday of high school I would step onto the platform with a burlap rucksack slung over one shoulder, the rough weave of it pressing into my collarbone, textbooks stacked inside like a portable archive of expectation, their regular weight an almost biblical burden that I carried without complaint because education was both obligation and escape.
The sequence was familiar enough to recite without looking up. Berala. Sefton. Regents Park. Birrong. The stations clicked past like beads on a secular rosary, and in those narrow carriages I rehearsed the version of myself that might one day exist beyond the suburb that felt both intimate and suffocating.
The train was the only corridor outward.
It took me to school where I performed competence and concealment in equal measure. It took me into the city where anonymity offered a rehearsal space for courage. It took me to my first gay date, heart hammering against ribs as the suburbs blurred past the window and I wondered whether desire could survive exposure.
It took me to ACON, to a youth group held in fluorescent rooms with plastic chairs and earnest facilitators, where I met the boy who would become my first real boyfriend and discovered that kinship could be assembled from fragments of shared fear and shared hunger rather than inherited wholesale.
And it took me back.
Back to my parents’ house after I had moved out and then returned, because independence is not always linear and sometimes survival requires a strategic retreat, back to the family home after a season of sleeping rough and learning too quickly how fragile a body can feel when it is not buffered by structure.
My first job was in a bookbinding factory, a position my father secured for me with the blunt efficiency of a man who believed work was the surest antidote to drift, and each morning the train carried me from suburb to suburb with my burlap bag lighter now, textbooks replaced by sandwiches and uncertainty.
I operated a folding and binding machine that swallowed loose pages and exhaled them as order, stacks of printed matter aligned and pressed into cohesion, and there was something quietly instructive in that mechanical choreography, in the transformation of scattered sheets into spine and cover.
At lunch I played euchre with a group of non white women who spoke with sharp humour and sharper intelligence, who tolerated my awkwardness with amused generosity, and in that fluorescent break room I met my first lesbian, whose presence felt like a door opening in a corridor I had not known existed, whose unapologetic selfhood offered a template for the possibility that survival need not mean diminishment.
The train took me there and took me home, over and over, steel on steel, repetition becoming ritual.
Standing now on platforms in France, watching pigeons patrol and sunlight flare against the rails, I feel the continuity of that earlier education in motion, because trains have always taught me that stagnation is rarely imposed and often internalised, that departure need not be dramatic to be transformative, and that missed connections are rarely terminal.
We missed one here in our first week, misreading a platform number, watching the doors close with a soft mechanical indifference that felt briefly humiliating and then instructive, because another train arrived and the delay lengthened our conversation rather than curtailing it, reminding me that movement is not a single event but a practice.
Stations are secular sanctuaries for those who understand that life unfolds in transit.
They are places where strangers stand side by side beneath printed prophecy, where destinations flicker and change, where the promise of elsewhere is both ordinary and radical, and I think about the boy with the burlap rucksack who believed that steel tracks were the only reliable escape from suburban suffocation, and I recognise that his faith in motion has carried me much further than he could have imagined.
Tarascon, Nîmes, Arles are not epic distances from Avignon, but they affirm a discipline I learned long ago, that leaving and returning are not contradictions but choreography, that a life can be rooted and still restless, that walls and rails can coexist without cancelling one another.
The timetable does not guarantee transcendence, but it insists upon departure, and as the TER hums its metallic lullaby and the doors close with their practiced sigh, I feel again the familiar comfort of being carried forward by something larger than my hesitation, trusting steel and schedule to do what they have always done for me, which is to move me against stagnation and toward whatever waits at the next station.