text: I know I'm supposed to do research during sabbatical, and I did some of that, but mostly I did a lot of thinking. My thinking was about my teaching, but not the kind of teaching in the classroom so much. That part gets a little boring. I've been teaching a long time, the same books, the same essays, the same rooms. But you--you're different. At least if I invited you here.
  
  I didn't invite you here because my research matches yours, no, not at all. I invited you here because there's something special about you. We have a particular connection, or maybe I just want to tell you something.
  
  So I have a message for each of you, and there are few enough of you that you can each have your own message unlike the foolish, generic faculty who even now are thinking of me with loathing as they read what I think of them.
  
  But you all know me really, not the mask I wear to faculty meetings. God it feels good to talk in my normal voice to you, I swear.
  
  So please, I ask you again. Who are you?
  
  > Belle, muse-touched.
  Belle, you already know how I feel about you, having spent so much time with me, as your advisor, talking about your future, planning and reaming whole new paths for you that could never have dreamed of when first you matriculated.
  
  When I think of you, I think of course of you when I first saw you. Thin, a sharp chin. Fierce-eyed, scattered, a green messenger bag hanging from your thin shoulders. Something birdy about you, hollow boned, but one of the meaner birds, a vulture say. Something that roosts with attitude. Solid, earth-tones, jeans, sweater coat. Few accessories. I want to say a white belt.
  
  You drank black coffee all day and acted like it.
  
  When I met you, you were an unhappy pre-law major unhappily taking my required freshling writing class, and receiving D.
  
  But when you think of our time together, what does it do to you? What do you think of?
  
  > Prof. Gower, you just think of how you inspired you.
  Thank you, Belle. I think of that too. And it was mutual. You weren't like any of the others I grew attached to, you know. You have some astonishing talent that I have yet to come to grips with.
  
  I was assigned as your first year advisor, to your surprise, as you thought you'd get a pre-law advisor, but the dotty registrar makes that sort of mistake all the time.
  
  You told me you hate your classes, you hate your major, you hate the school, and you hate yourself.
  
  We receive no training in advising, by the by. It's all learned on the job. Either you have it or you don't. Usually I don't.
  
  "Coffee?" I said.
  
  "God, yes."
  
  I bought her coffee and I enjoyed a latte, and then I bought her another one. She refused a scone.
  
  "What's going on?"
  
  "Stuff."
  
  "Specify."
  
  "Nghh."
  
  Three days later there was a poem in my inbox, my real honest-to-god inbox, made of wood and living in the faculty lounge. It was written on a ripped-out piece of journal paper.
  
  > Belle's poem
  I'm trapped between my past and my future
  
  I'm hungry for answers
  
  I'm just hungry
  
  I'm lost in my present
  
  Everything is locked and everyone is handed me keys
  
  But keys bore me
  
  Drugs bore me
  
  Fucking bores me
  
  Drinking bores me
  
  Sleep bores me
  
  This poem bores me
  
  I just stay awake
  
  Until I go to sleep
  
  I get dirty
  
  Until I shower
  
  I live until I die
  
  It wasn't a great poem. It wasn't even a good poem. But it was a poem, and could just vaguely discern at the very bottom of the murky water, a little gleam of gold that could be panned for.
  
  I'm glad you remember, Belle. That took some courage. I know how your hand must have been shaking as you put that in there, wondering if I would just throw it away. I usually do, you know, when students try to direct their garbage to my attention. But this felt different.
  
  What else do you remember? What passes through your mind about us when you close your eyes?
  
  > Helped you change your major.
  "No, you're a writer."
  
  "Yeah, that's why you gave an F on my thesis-driven driven argument essay."
  
  "Forget that. I don't care about that. I think you're a writer."
  
  "I'm pre-law."
  
  "No, I don't think so."
  
  You smiled a little, (crooked teeth, never had braces) and took out of your messenger bag her cliche of a Moleskin journal which was covered with ink drawing and verse inside, and I steadfastly ignored the drugs in your bag. Just like, loose bags of pot in there and other pills in ziplocs.
  
  "I'm not allowed to be an English major. I want to. I write all day, but only what I'm intersted in. About people I see on the subway, about kids. Once I sat on a hill and tried for an hour to write a poem about a leaf I saw. I ended up with a shit poem about a leaf. Want to read it?"
  
  "No, I'm good. It was probably a good exercise for you, though. Have to write a lot of shit poems to get to the decent ones."
  
  "My parents won't let me switch major."
  
  "Belle, fuck your parents. Seriously." Advisors aren't supposed to say that.
  
  "Fuck my parents?"
  
  "Yeah," I said. "Seriously, just fuck them. Here's the major switch form."
  
  I took you to the campus restaurant to celebrate, and brought two of your friends, both English majors as well, whom I knew and tolerated. You didn't eat, though.
  
  What else do you think of from those golden times?
  
  > Prof. Gower--you took you to the poetry reading.
  It was a great day, wasn't it, Belle? The department was allowed to invite one student to read her poetry at the state-wide Poetry Competition, and I ensured that you were our representative, the best poet our university could provide.
  
  It makes me sad that you can't think of that day now, that you don't remember the poem you read, now that you've left your creative life behind in the dust, in exchange for a quieter existance.
  
  You stood up there, after having begged me to make sure your name didn't appear on the website (it was actually on the front page of the site, nothing I could do--the PR people love this stuff) and you read your poem about a kiss and about how all the poems about kisses had been written already and that people should stop kissing because it was impossible to kiss, or write about kisses, or think about kisses in any possible way that was not cliche, and yet there was something kind of nice about being part of a long, unbroken tradition of lips touching, back centuries, millennia, all of those lips, breathing in each other's air, speaking quiet non-words of love into each other's mouth.
  
  It wasn't just the typical undergraduate poem where the punch line was "Oh, and I'm gay" although that was there too, or the one where you reflect on your terrible choices, though that was there too, but just a good, good poem.
  
  We all watched you up there shaking a little, freezing in the auditorium, looking at if you might pass out.
  
  I was so proud of you, Belle. I didn't care about anything else I'd ever done.
  
  > And then you were gone.
  "Hey, Professor."
  
  "What?"
  
  "When I die..."
  
  "Shut up, Belle."
  
  "When I die, promise me you won't ever write some retarded..."
  
  "Don't say 'retarded,' Belle."
  
  "...some retarded story about me where I sound like some etherial girl with a spark of passion and a crushing family life. Don't say, 'Belle faded away, her limbs thin, her eyes sunken. You cannot sustain a life on nothing but poems and weed. You need food, and Belle simply would not eat.' I know how you write. Promise me."
  
  "I don't write like that."
  
  "And don't write, 'Belle dreamed and slept and dreamed of art and beauty, and dreamed forever, never awakening from her idiotically OD'd sleep, the dumbass.'"
  
  "Your impressions of me suck."
  
  "No they don't. They're perfect. Just don't write that, all right?"
  
  "Stop writing poems on your arm."
  
  "Don't tell me what to do. You aren't my mother. Promise?"
  
  "OK, fine, I promise."
  
  > Totally gone.
  Then your mother came and yanked you out of school, saying there were too many bad influences here, and if you refused to switch majors, that was that.
  
  So, you see, I can write lyrically about you all I want, because, shockingly you didn't die. That was the trajectory you were headed for, and I couldn't save you, only keep you company as you went slowly off the rails.
  
  But instead now you are, according to Google, working in a pre-professional certificate-granting institution at a "training academy" (?) for business/law which feeds into a paralegal program. You are living at home, and once you posted a poem and then deleted it one hour later on a creative writing site.
  
  So I think I will mourn you, Belle. If you died, that would be sad and beautiful and horrible, and I would think of your burning anger and talent. Instead, I have to think about you filling out forms and pushing down your resentment. At any rate, the particular Belle, that Belle, is gone forever. Even if you came back to visit, and I noticed your arms had some thickness to them, and you seemed less angsty, and you didn't reek of week, even if you claimed you were happier, which I hope you are, that particular Belle, the Belle I think of, at that particular precious moment is gone, and the path you didn't go down, I think about and wonder about. I miss her and mourn her.
  
  I wish you were here to read this. Nobody will ever click down this link but the ghost of you, if a living person can have a ghost, which I think they can.
  
  So, what's the verdict, then? The faculty and administration are still reading their version of the sabbatical report, but between you and me, I don't care about them. It's always been about you, and the few other special students.
  
  > forget them and come bring you back.
  I am already on my way, Belle. Driving west toward you, where I will find you and administer CPR if I can.
  
  Madness, perhaps, but I have lost too many vibrant students to stupid mistakes and idiotic happenstance to let it happen again, to lose you.
  
  I suppose this is not "appropriate behavior." But that really isn't important to me right now. I'm coming, Belle, and when I see you, I'll know if you're still in there, and if you are, I shall fetch you back.
  
  Hastily, so hastily, as I hit 95 miles per hour, I thus conclude my Sabbatical Report.