Why I Haven't Posted Anything in Ages: Deep, Dark, and Personal
In late February of 2006, a lot of key members were missing from Muppet Central Forum. There were busy schedules... There were computer issues... Beauregard would occasionally be locked out of the site for no apparent reason, theprawncracker had a virus, and TogetherAgain was blocked from the site... by choice.
Yes, by choice. She talked about it with her parents, and her father blocked her computer from reaching Muppet Central. Why, you ask? Well, it started with one very dark night...
I mentioned, a while back, that TogetherAgain wasn't used to her brains getting her very far. This has a lot to do with procrastination. No matter how much she tried to plan ahead, she would inevitably be pulling a very late night, if not an all-nighter, the night before the big project/paper/presentation was due.
I also mentioned that TogetherAgain had an awesome English teacher her Junior year of high school, and that largely because of him, English became her favorite subject again.
But no single teacher, no matter how spectacular, can do everything.
The assignment was to do a report on a poet from some specific time period, preferably one on the list provided by the teacher. Give a presentation on the poet's life and style of poetry, and analyze one of his/her poems. He went over the list, giving a vague idea of something on each of the poets so that the class wasn't choosing blindly. Most of those blurbs went right over TogetherAgain's head, but one comment stuck in her head. Something about this poet's most famous poem being about the Holocaust...
Oh, the Holocaust! TogetherAgain thought. That applies to me. I'm Jewish. I'm going to be visiting old concentration camps this summer. The Holocaust is interesting! Which poet is that? Sylvia Plath? I'll do my presentation on HER!
Maybe the teacher should have mentioned that Sylvia Plath committed suicide at the age of thirty. Or maybe he did, and TogetherAgain should have paid more attention.
Analysis, especially of poems, was not TogetherAgain's forte. Combine this fact with the habit of procrastination. Was it any surprise that she was up late the night before the presentation, struggling to make any progress?
The assignment, in retrospect, was to take a depressing poem by a depressing poet and analyze it to make it even more depressing.
She sat at her desk, trying and failing and trying and failing again, glaring at the clock and the calendar and her computer, trying and failing and trying and failing again... And then a few terrifying thoughts popped into her head, seemingly out of the blue.
What if I died? Oh I wouldn't mind. Oh, I wouldn't mind doing it myself...
TogetherAgain tried to ignore that thought. She had work to do. She had to finish this in time to get on the bus tomorrow, and...
It was a persistant little thought.
She wrote it down on a notecard and set it aside.
Her eyes kept straying over to that notecard...
She turned it over.
...It was a persistant little thought.
A plan began to develop in TogetherAgain's head. She would post a new thread on Muppet Central to explain... e-mail a link to her mother... There was a bottle of Tylenol PM in the medicine cabinet. She would just... take all the pills, and...
But posting a thread on Muppet Central meant that others would reply. They wouldn't want her to do this. They would try to convince her otherwise. How long would it take for people to see, to reply? How long would she give them before she went and took the bottle? Would they convince her? Did she want them to? Would she give them that chance?
Suicide was wrong. Wasn't it? ...Why was it so appealing right now?
TogetherAgain noticed a friend on MSN Instant Messenger. The same friend who had too much of a life to read her fan fiction. The same friend who had given her Kermit socks for no real reason at all. The same friend to whom TogetherAgain had talked when she'd thought about running away. ...With a double-click of the mouse, TogetherAgain began her cry for help.
They talked for a while. Then the friend called TogetherAgain's cell phone, and they talked a little more. Then they hung up, and TogetherAgain took a deep breath and went to talk to her mother. It was in that conversation that they decided, among other things, that TogetherAgain should be blocked from Muppet Central for a little while. They usually would have disconnected her internet, but TogetherAgain needed it for school.
She also needed it for MSN Instant Messenger.
TogetherAgain and Beauregard had already been talking quite a bit over Instant Messaging, mostly about stories and story ideas. Now, Beauregard was one of three people, outside of TogetherAgain's family, whom she told about that dreadful night. He provided the support she needed, the assurance that life was good, without any lecturing or disappointment, without laughing it off, but also without focusing only on that.
Thanks, Beauregard. It really, truly helped.
And after that, things began to get better...
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) and hope for more soonish! 
Stop Spanish! cue card.
