Avignon Almanac VI - River Rite
The Rhône does not perform for you.
It does not glitter obligingly or curve coquettishly for photographs, and it certainly does not narrow itself to suit your sense of proportion; it moves with a breadth and brown weight that feels older than the walls that attempt to frame it, and standing beside it in winter sun I understood immediately that this river is not scenery but archive, not backdrop but accomplice.
The winter light falls softly across the surface, catching sediment and swirl in muted gold, and along the bank a couple quarrels in tones low enough to remain private yet sharp enough to signal fracture, their silhouettes leaning toward and away from one another in alternating waves of proximity and retreat, and I am struck by how rivers host such scenes without judgment, absorbing argument and affection alike into their steady movement.
The Rhône carries flood marks along its edges like marginalia, stone and quay stained with the memory of previous excess, and fishermen stand with patient posture near the slower bends while ferries cut methodical paths across its width, mechanical interruptions in an otherwise ancient rhythm, and the entire tableau suggests that water is less a container than a collaborator in human narrative, bearing witness without intervention, recording without restraint.
Grief, I have learned, behaves more like a river than a room.
It moves. It swells. It recedes. It returns in altered form, and when I stand beside the Rhône I feel the cumulative weight of other rivers that have shaped the map of my life, each one carrying a version of me downstream toward something I did not yet know how to name.
The Parramatta River was the first to teach me that water can border both suburb and possibility, and I remember one late afternoon sitting on the worn grass near its edge with a boy from school who would never quite admit what we both understood, the air thick with western Sydney heat and unspoken tension, our conversation circling safe topics while the river moved with indifferent continuity beside us, and I realise now that even then I sensed that life would not remain contained within the boundaries of that suburb, that the river’s slow drift toward the harbour suggested an exit route my younger self could not yet articulate.
The Brisbane River introduced me to the seduction of flood, and during one summer storm I stood on a footbridge watching brown water surge past with a force that rendered the city briefly fragile, the rain needling my face while I felt a strange exhilaration at the sight of infrastructure humbled, because by then I had already experienced how swiftly stability can be rearranged, and the river’s swollen insistence mirrored my own interior turbulence in a period of reinvention that required leaving behind not only addresses but assumptions.
The Yarra in Melbourne offered a different intimacy, narrower and more performative as it wound through the city’s curated cool, and I remember walking its banks after a political meeting that had left me both galvanised and exhausted, the conversation about strategy and survival still humming in my ears while rowers sliced the water in disciplined lines, and I felt the tension between activism and anonymity, between the desire to change systems and the desire simply to be held by something older than the argument, and the Yarra, muddied yet persistent, seemed to suggest that both agitation and endurance can occupy the same current.
The Thames in London felt imperial in its self awareness, wide and tidal and heavy with the residue of empire, and one evening I stood on Waterloo Bridge after an argument that had ruptured a relationship I believed was permanent, watching the lights fracture across the dark surface while boats moved with bureaucratic calm beneath me, and I understood with sudden clarity that cities can absorb heartbreak without ceremony, that the river would continue its tidal breathing regardless of my personal implosion, and that there is a kind of comfort in knowing your devastation is not singular but simply another ripple in a long, sedimented history.
The Swan in Perth carried a softer melancholy, wide and luminous at dusk, and I remember sitting on its edge with a paper bag of chips after a phone call that confirmed a loss I had long anticipated, the sky streaked pink and the water reflecting it with deceptive serenity, and in that moment the river felt less like escape and more like accompaniment, a horizontal horizon that suggested that grief need not be contained within walls but could be allowed to move, to stretch, to disperse across a surface that refused stagnation.
And now the Rhône, broader than any of them in its physical assertion, brown and unvarnished and unapologetic, receives my attention with the indifference of something that has outlived empires and epidemics alike, and as I watch the quarrelling couple drift apart and then tentatively back together, as I note the flood lines etched into stone and the fishermen casting patient arcs into opaque water, I feel the accumulated sediment of these rivers within me.
Each river has held a version of my becoming.
Each has witnessed departure and return.
Each has carried away illusions I once believed permanent.
The Rhône does not demand confession, but it invites continuity, and in its steady movement I recognise the truth that grief is not a container to be sealed and shelved but a current to be entered and navigated, that loss does not end at the bank where it first breaks but travels onward, reshaping shorelines and softening stone without erasing either.
Winter sun settles across the brown water with a restraint that feels almost tender, and the ferries continue their practical crossings while the fishermen remain patient and the couple’s quarrel dissolves into something quieter, and I stand there aware that every river I have lived beside has functioned as archive and accomplice, storing the memory of who I was while conspiring gently in who I would become.
Stone remembers flood.
Water remembers nothing and everything at once.
And I am learning, slowly and without resistance, to let grief move rather than harden, to trust the current rather than construct another wall against it.