text: [Themes: modern]
  
  Who indeed. Well, I suppose we've had some pleasantries. Now I suppose it is time to sort the wheat from the chaff.
  
  As you are perfectly aware, the purpose of a sabbatical is to do research. The rules in the abysmal Faculty Handbook says that a faculty report, to be complete must
  
  a) clearly outline your goals and objectives. (Goals and objectives, mind you--you must have both)
  
  b) address how the afrosaid (sic) goals or objectives (backing away from the demand for both) were met as evidenced by the assessment of your goals and objectives (no, they want both)
  
  c) describe the factors that led to the fulfillment of your goals/objectives (!); also explain the barriers to the fufliment (sic) of your gaols (sic).
  
  d) reflect on what was completed during the sabbatical period and what remains for you when you return.
  
  So! We have our work cut out for us, don't we, if I am ever to hope to fufli my gaols.
  
  We'll have to hit those points. But before we do that, I suppose I ought to know who you are, to whom I am speaking. After all, a faculty member ought to receive a sort of different sabbatical presentation than an undergraduate than an administration member, I'm sure you'll agree.
  
  And this interactive sabbatical presentation, offered by special permission of the good Vice President Colin, would be a wasted exercise if I did not create a major fork in the road at this point, this beating heart of my presentation which will presently branch out into vena cavae both superior (administration) and inferior (faculty) and a thick aorta (students). And then we will have good fun with the minor veins and arteries and the cute little capillaries that my red word-cells are floating in, to give nourishment to your brain.
  
  So, again, not to be too repetitive, we only have twenty minutes, if I remember correctly, and I am almost surely on Route 128 at this point listening to "More than a Feeling" or something, Natalie's favorite song, you know.
  
  So who are you? If you are my very favorite creative writing professor, Whitney, of course, you are faculty, and I have made a special page just for you, since you are my protogee. Everyone else, choose. Now.
  
  > Student.
  Dear children--I know you are actually young adults, and it really is not fair to my own children to say that--but I can't help being a little affectionate.
  
  So, hi! It's me, Prof. Gower.
  
  While I have the faculty totally preoccupied with my various unassailable defenses to whatever they are charging me with, whatever beefs they have with me, I thought I'd give you the important part of this sabbatical report. It's all about you, in the end.
  
  Thanks for standing up for me when they tried to kick me out last year, btw.
  
  > A special invitation.
  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?
  
  > Jules Wine, who is a glowing, radiant angel.
  Jules Wine! I met you first in my King Arthur class, shockingly, as you were a nursing student in the oddball Professional College, unlike my beloved Humanities.
  
  You sat in the front row, right in the center, the seat that we professors call the "middle of the Golden T" because students who choose to sit in the T of the right row and the center column always--research proves this--do best, and the student who sits front and center does best.
  
  You set out a fresh one-subject notebook, college-ruled, three perfect pencils, two pens (one black, one blue) and a pack of colorful, sparkly gel pens for taking additional notes in different colors. You also had--I'll never forget--a three-ounce diet Coke, a tiny sugar-free yogurt, and a small tupperware containing six raspberries. You ate these then smiled contentedly, totally full. Angels don't need food.
  
  You also had the textbook on the first day, unlike everyone else, which you had covered with buff paper and decorated, writing the words King Arthur on the front. You wrote in your notebook the date and "Introduction to Class" on the first page, then hovered your pen over the paper waiting for me to teach.
  
  > Celestial
  You wore a cardigan and a cross, you were celestially beautiful, meaning not traditionally attractive, but as if haloed and bewinged. You looked like Raphael might have painted you and as if you should have been holding a lute.
  
  Naturally, as an angel, you would have an advantage your fellow majors in that cutthroat discipline did not. You could likely simply place your hands over the wounded and transmit your inner goodness and life and light into them, healing them on the spot.
  
  And here you were taking your required literature elective with me.
  
  Jules Wine--I always think of you by your first and last name, my dear, as if it were some strange vintage of liquor, a brimming goblet of Jules Wine--what do you remember of me and our short time together?
  
  > Professor Gower, you remember mostly taking your Mythology class--the second class you told with you.
  It was so surprising to see you were registed for my Classical Mythology class the next year. I was certain I'd seen the last of you after you received an "A" in my King Arthur class.
  
  After all, you had satisfied your literature requirement, and the nursing major frowns upon--indeed, practically disallows--further experimentation in any class where you don't have to use a sphygmomanometer. And the nursing major was cutthroat indeed, ruthlessly culling out students who seem less than motivated or who get less than an eighty-five in anything.
  
  But here you were, with your gel pens and a tupperware with three thin slices of pear for your lunch. "I just really like this stuff," you said.
  
  I saw you take in the information, absorb the stories, happy for one-and-one-quarter hours to be thinking about Odysseus on the sea, Bellerophon soaring on Pegasus, Hector holding his beautiful and doomed child on the walls of Troy, and not about code blues, syringe safety, or bedpan usage.
  
  You were, with my help, building a storehouse of beauty that we were filling to nourish you for the life of bustling healing you would have, something to give you interesting dreams, something to give you a fertile plot where stories might grow that you could tell your future children when they got restless at the bank, topics to think about that didn't involve blood or pus or sebum when you were reflecting on your day.
  
  > Not close.
  We did not grow close the way I did with Meg or Belle, because you cannot be "close" with an angel. But that was true of your peers as well. You treated them all with respect but also kept a certain formal distance.
  
  You turned the page a bit primly when our textbook showed pictures of nude heroes or goddesses, or bloody battles. It was a primness I didn't expect from a nursing student.
  
  Your participated three times per times, modestly, perfectly. You paid attention. You reflected on what other people said and linked your participations to their, as per the syllabus' instructions, which you had read and laminated and kept in your binder.
  
  Is there anything you recall most of all?
  
  Jules Wine, you had an aura about you that made everyone around you try harder. My classes were better for you. My life was better for you. I took more care in preparing my lectures. I thought about how you, only you, would respond to my assignments. I considered you when deciding on what class I would teach each semester. Would Jules Wine learn more from Chaucer or from Milton? I picked Milton, knowing that you would love to read poetry about angels and Satan and Adam and Eve, this nudity less secular, these battles spiritual.
  
  And you did return a third time, for Milton, really straining the old Nursing electives budget. You blew your whole three electives on me.
  
  > remember, Professor Gower, not caring about your ranking.
  Yes, the nursing students were ranked, weren't they, and your ranks rose and fell practically daily. There were and are more students who want into the nursing program than there are slots, and so competition was fierce.
  
  Students could not study together or share notes without endangering their slot, at least until they were safely ensconced in junior year. The bimonthly exams were ruthless weeders-out of those less than wholly dedicated.
  
  And your choosing to take literature classes endangered that, Jules Wine, and you didn't care. You started high on the list, and your ranking dwindled, dwindled down to page two, near the big red line that you needed to stay above.
  
  I saw you in the library the night before an anatomy and physiology exam, well known to me as the night that one could walk across campus and see dozens of young women and a few men crying on benches, in the cafeteria, beneath trees, just crying and crying because the pressure was too much. I would see them furiously studying their flash cards in my class while I was teaching--why even go to class at that point! I would see them coloring their anatomy coloring books trying to learn the muscles and their functions. They could not study together or they would risk undoing their progress if someone else should happen to get one single more point.
  
  But I saw you, Jules Wine, having put down your Milton passage that I had assigned, a bit of beautiful poetry about the question of the goodness of the soul, and go and help a crying girl sitting on the floor under her desk, and you studied together, leaving your own work unfinished. And then you talked to her and sat with her, getting your perfect clothes dirty, no doubt.
  
  And when, eventually, your ranking fell too far the following semester, I thought of that night, and realized that you were already angelic. You didn't need the accreditation of a nursing program to heal. And you inspired me.
  
  > Inspiration.
  You inspired me, Jules Wine, like you inspired everyone you met. Your light shone, your celestial nature, your real, true goodness.
  
  If I am lucky and the student is diligent (like you), I get to see her for 2.5 hours per week, for fifteen weeks per semester, so let's call it 40 hours in a semester (if we include a few office hours and hall-bump-intos). From this brief sample, one extrapolates a whole life. Is it a statistically meaningful sample? I used to think so. I imagined you studying late, dreaming of helping, maybe dancing to a nice song, calling your mother weekly, writing in your diary of your dreams and hopes, eating a rice cakes, which made you full after half, and perhaps indulging in a few other tidbits while you fidget with your Fitbit.
  
  Sorry. I'm just playing with words now, trying to put off the inevitable.
  
  Because my imagining was wrong, and instead of unicorn pillows and going to mass filling your days and thoughts and future, you were instead punche din your perfect face by your boyfriend, breaking your orbit, maxilla, other parts, giving you anzygomaticomaxillary complex and I may have the words wrong but I don't want to look it up.
  
  You would know all those parts, having studied them so carefully for your anatomy and physiology exams. And you end up in the ICU with brain sweling, hemorraging, infarcations, and other terms that one memorizes to get in one's brain for the exam, but which one never imagines will happen to one's actual brain.
  
  > Recovery
  I titled this page recovery, but that was just me trying to cheer us both up.
  
  You were moved to another wing of the hospital, where you remain, a ventilator ravaging your throat, with people saying things about you like "I think she knows we're here." I brought you a laurel plant to look at, which I placed on the nightstand by the side of you that still has an eye to see.
  
  You may yet recover.
  
  But you cannot be here to click these links, alas. Perhaps you will some day, when tissues mend and blood vessels knit together, and eyes regrow, and brains can be rekindled from little memories I've harvested. Perhaps you are in there still, thinking of King Arthur, and Classical Mythology, and Milton.
  
  I hope so.
  
  > Goodbye, Jules Wine
  It should be obvious, then, that this cannot be real, that this all a coma-girl's mad imaginings of revenge and anger and violence and sorrow. No sabbatical report could ever look like this. We know that.
  
  But since this is all just madness and ravings and fever dreams and you lying there in the hospital bed, pulse blipping away, ventilator ventilating, fragmentedly thinking about what could happen, how does this end for you?
  
  > wake up to you holding your hand.
  "You're back," I say to you, Jules Wine.
  
  You don't say anything. You can't, through the ventilator. Your eye, your one eye, is still closed, but it flutters.
  
  You then fully awake and stretch and yank out the ventilator and your eye has healed. And your brain is better and time turns back, and I am holding your hand, giving you strength, and telling you I'm sorry, and my life has prepared me to deal with commas, not comas, and I think, I think, I think, by writing this path, it will be a magic spell that restores you and I will look into your eye again.
  
  And this concludes my Sabbatical Report.