gistfile1.txt

  There's a blog I don't think anyone else reads.  I ran across it searching for something else, and something about it, the tone of voice perhaps, so flat and bleak and hopeless, caught my attention.  I bookmarked it.
  If the girl who kept it knew that anyone was reading it, anybody cared, perhaps she would not have taken her own life.  She even wrote about what she was going to do, the pills, the Numbutal and Seconal and the rest, that she had stolen a few at a time over the months from her stepfather's bathroom, the plastic bag, the loneliness, and wrote about it in a flat, pragmatic way, explaining that while she knew that suicide attempts were cries for help, this really wasn't, she just didn't want to live any longer.
  She counted down to the big day, and I kept reading, uncertain what to do, if anything.  There was not enough identifying information on the Web page even to tell me which continent she lived on.  No e-mail address.  No way to leave comments.  The last message was simply, "Tonight."
  I wondered whom I should tell, if anyone, and then I shrugged, and, best as I could, I swallowed the feeling that I had let the world down.
  And then she started to post again.  She says she's cold and she's lonely.
  I think she knows I'm still reading...

-- Neil Gaiman, 10/31/06 new york times op-ed piece, "ghosts in the machines"