[M4F] Hands-On with the Braille Professor

I organized my notes for about the fourth time, then headed confidently to the front of the auditorium. The lecture hall was not too full, around thirty students, but it was my first class teaching and I was a little nervous, I wanted to make a good impression.

I wore a blue suit jacket, a blue tie, and a micro-suede shirt with some new grey dress trousers. I stood in front of the students and began. "Good evening, welcome to Braille Fundamentals. As you can see, I can't. I was born blind due to a genetic condition, and so Braille was one of the first things I remember learning. Braille is a six-dot writing system, created by Louis Braille in France in 1825. This was just after the wars with Napoleon. Braille would then emigrate to England, and then to America. Braille would undergo many changes over its two hundred year history. Now it is in every language; it has a separate code for math; it has a code for music; and most importantly it has a code for contractions. Contractions are short forms for words or parts of words, and currently there around 140 Braille contractions. But I am getting ahead of myself. What I want you to understand is that contrary to how things may seem, Braille is not a dead language. The blind now have screen reading technology, but that can't match the feeling of holding a book in your hands, the feeling of being able to write on paper, the importance of hard copies. I have had this argument many times with other blind friends, but my stance is that so long as people are writing with pens, so long as books are published instead of just e-books, I want those same opportunities in Braille."

The class then took careful notes on diagrams of the Braille alphabet. Over the next few weeks, the students would be focussing on the Alphabet Braille and punctuation, before moving on to the contractions.

**** I was just getting ready to leave after my office hours, when I suddenly noticed a paper I'd missed. It was on my desk and apple cented.

"Dear Professor, I long for you to read my body like the Braille letters you are teaching us. You speak with such authority, such knowledge, I just want you to gently guide me. I picture your fingers tangling in my hair. I imagine your fingers carressing my cheeks, my neck, moving down over my breasts and lower. I am eager to receive any and all feedback on this creative writing assignment. Your secret admirer"

I was a bit taken aback. I hadn't ever received an anonymous love note (let alone one in Braille) thought they were just a trope of corny teen romance movies. But I obviously could not act on this, the author said they were a student of mine, and that would be unprofessional. How would I even go about identifying them, even if I wanted to, which I obviously did not. Strangely, later that week, fate would have other plans.