To Thine Own Self Be True

Man, if you can't be honest to your diary, then what hope does anyone have of getting it from you?
The last 2 days have marked a real deterioration in me. The weight of all this nothingness is pushing me into a hazy, conscious oblivion, where there is a constant inner numbness that ahces.
I wash floors, I clean the oven till it shines, I sort out my office - is that some kind of pleasure, or just relief?
From 2.15 to 3 pm, I sit alone on a bench in the riverside garden (as if there is another one somewhere else, like up the mountain...ha-ha-ha!), exhange godd afternoons with a passing old man and realise that I am already like him and the countless others of this town's visibly ageing population, looking for somewhere to pass another day's endless hours of nothing, doing nothing, achieving nothing more than spending time until tomorrow. At least he can talk for hours with his mates about Benfica. Living just to talk about a football club, which lives on its past glories, is like living just to talk about mud.
I sit there, staring out across the river to that static, out-of-reach flat horizon on the other side, noting that nothnig has changed except the temperature since January, trying to think. But it has gone too far and the nothingness is too heavy a burden for more than a minimum of depressing cogency.
 
The only movement in this frozen panorama is the downstream current, a fluttering of absurd, meaninglçess flags and three or four aerobatic swallows. On the way there, I had passed a pigeon, dead but sitting upright, like one of the dozing old men. Maybe it was one of these, captured 4 months ago.
 
A solitary seagull, my first sighting in weeks, flew purposefully upriver, me watching until it disappeared after the bridge, as if it was anxious to pass quickly and not be infected.
All i could try to think about was the battery of dates bringing anniversaries and memories of conflicting extremes almost every day from now on. To make it worse, I remember the sequence of days either side of all the events. What an affliction that can be.
August is terrible; this year, the 10th anniversaries seem to be of just about everything, and the significance of Princess Diana's death is far more than just that. August 1997 now seems like the pivotal momth between all my pre-1997 and all of my 10 years since. It feels like everything to follow was determined and sealed in August 1997.
Tomorrow, Monday 13th marks 17 years since Monday 13th August 1990.
However, I fear that Wednesday 15th is going to be the toughest to endure, marking as it does 30 years since Monday 15th August 1977.
My Dad would have been 94 on Thursday 16th. I still miss him, but I thank the skies that he is not still here. Not to see this. He saw enough.
I feel that I have no more resistance or defences to what is happening to me now, however much I have been complicit or responsible.
Life should not be like this. Not mine, at least, if I don't have the means to bear it.