Before accusing another person of having been bitten by the inductive bug, it is an idea to look into the mirror and realise that its teeth have perforated your own skin.
That my ex-girlfriend suffers throughout the duration of January is an unsurprising as the fact that your author struggles during the middle period of July. They mark significant anniversaries of unpleasant events, the tendrils of which pass effortlessly through the years, and shake the present from its foundation.
Unpleasant events become the paradigm by which we judge their anniversaries, and so it follows (in the mind of the depressive) that if this day ten years ago was unbearable for whatever reason, then this day in 2008, like the ones every year since, must also be unbearable.
We make it thus, or I do, at any rate. The carrying out of particular rituals at appropriate times - derived from religious ceremonies and war commemorations (dressing in black, holding silences of a particular duration) seem as logical to me as they seem unhinged and irrational to anyone else.
It is, then, already decided that the middle of July or the whole of January is to be spent in stasis. What a rehearsed, formluaic mourning this is! The ripening of the heart throughout the course of the year, and the predictable windfall from the height of being, followed by the harvesting of peculiar, distant misery.
Thus emerges the obsession with dates and times alluded to in the last entry. There is an internal countdown within the obsessive which states, for example: "In two weeks, three days, 11 hours and 37 minutes, the sixth anniversary of event x will be upon me." Reading that last line is akin to something out of a comic book, but its imminence - and its distance - are considered with undue seriousness.
When the anniversary itself arrives - measured in terms of minutes if not seconds - there is no feeling of relief, or happiness, or sadness. Just the acceptance that it is here, and a proliferation of empty gestures related to the moment eight, nine, ten years ago when the planet seemed to shudder on its axis because of a private, everday event.
