I stood on the balcony and casually glanced into the atrium below me. My senses were immediately arrested; pink petals floating on the water! I could not stop the shudder they evoked and they weren't even roses. I looked to find the last blossom of a geranium bending toward the rocky edge of the little pond. "Fraud," I thought, "to conger up such feelings reserved for pink rose petals." But since I was waiting for my son to choose a book from the stacks on the second floor of the library and my mind had little else to do, they came: . . .

          Life is so tragic when one is sixteen. Love is idyllic. Birds sing. The sun shines. Flowers are fragrant. Literature is perfect. Life is not. Yet at sixteen one's idealism means they must assume responsibility for those things that are not perfect. We are too young to recognize the ideal as a sham. A fake. A Utopia that does not exist. The world has lied to us but we are too naive to know that all the love stories of all time are not credible witness to real life. So we bear the guilt on our own skinny, little shoulders. And we carry it bravely, afraid we might prove incompetent. We are, after all, "adults" in our own minds. We are old enough to love. Juliet was. At sixteen.

          I was no different. I was in love and he was beautiful: my real life Adonis. He had a beautiful smile and an easy laugh. He was the "life of the party." And Adonis? He proclaimed his love for me loud and clear. He insisted we dress alike so that everyone would know I was "his." He wrote me long love poems. He picked flowers and brought them to me at school. Pink roses were his favorite because they were "almost as beautiful" as I. I was flattered. I was enamored.

          There were little love notes tucked inside my books and small gifts in my locker. He called every night to make sure I was safe at home; to make sure I missed him. I wore my hair the way he liked. I dressed the way he liked. I wore the perfume he bought me. When he said, Jump," I asked, "How high?" on the way up. I was so in love with love. I was so blind and unprepared.

          "Why were you talking to him? What did he say to you?" he twisted my arm painfully behind me, flashing his beautiful smile and beautiful white teeth.

          "He just asked what the assignment pages were for trig. That's all."

          "Well, I don't like you talking to him," twisting my arm higher, "remember that!" He bent down and picked up the books I dropped when he grabbed my arm. "I'm sorry," he continued, "I didn't mean to make you drop these. Here." he handed me the stack and flashed that easy smile, "we better hurry or we're going to be late." I took my books and followed him into our physics class.

          I no longer remember the question, but I remember raising my hand to answer it while our teacher was still writing on the board and his back was turned to us. I got a horse-bite in my left leg just above the knee and lowered my hand. I couldn't open my mouth for fear that I would cry out. Eyes smarting. Breathing in little arrested jerks. Adonis shoved a scrawled note in front of me, "don't raise your hand if I don't know the answer - makes me look bad" I had finger bruises in my thigh to remind me for days. Through two years, unseen, new finger prints reminded me often. I also learned that Bunsen burners can be very persuasive. I learned fast and only lost a little hair. It didn't burn . . . it sizzled and shriveled and turned to ash without producing a flame. It also smelled. One of those smells that's still locked in my brain. "Hey," Adonis announced loudly, "I told you not to bend so close. You melted your hair net." He flashed that beautiful smile disarmingly at the whole class. And they believed the lie that I was afraid to contradict. He had laughed with that same smile when he told me about dousing a cat with gasoline and setting a match to it.

          I shudder again.

          Somehow Adonis knew that no matter how well I minded, no matter how much love we professed, he did not own my soul. I would not give it up. It stayed defiant and would not bend to pain or intimidation. And he offered little glimpses of hope. "I'm sorry," he would cry, tears sliding down his cheeks, "I didn't mean to hurt you. I'll never do it again. Please forgive me. I just love you so much it makes me crazy when you talk to another guy. I don't want to hurt you." Threats were veiled in concern for me and our relationship. But as my resistance held, they escalated to include my family and specifically my baby brother. I knew he was capable of carrying them out. Adonis claimed to love my brother. My brother loved Adonis and couldn't wait for him to come over and play with him. At night when I got him ready for bed, I checked him for signs of bruises that matched mine. There were never any but still that one threat was the most powerful. I hoped if I did exactly as Adonis said I would protect my brother from harm.

          Still, I refused to relinquish that small voice inside me that said I was better than this. Love was greater than this. There is a rightness to the universe that is more powerful than this. So we continued locked in the dance: he to gain power and control; me to maintain my self. It was an ugly dance. I began to find single pink roses in my locker that had been completely smashed. They were frightening but I refused to be smashed. I kept those flattened roses in a shoe box to remind myself that there was an essence to the rose that went beyond its physical beauty. I had bruises on my legs and my back and "rug burns" on my arms from Adonis twisting my flesh in his strong hands. He could not have my soul.

          Vietnam was my salvation. Adonis was called to war. Adonis with the quick wit and easy smile was called to fight. Some perversity in me surfaced while he was gone. Letters did not inflict physical pain and seeing him less, I began to believe that love could, indeed, conquer all. But in the army, Adonis was allowed to murder with impunity. He came home for R & R and gloated about his own accomplishments: the number of people he had personally killed. He was euphoric. He held me possessively in his arm and I discovered that he was much stronger; I also recognized true fear. I was so relieved when he left that I almost collapsed. I had been waiting to exhale, waiting for something to happen. I packed up everything that had belonged to him and dropped it off at the Goodwill. I threw all of his poems in the trashcan and burned them. I sent him a "Dear John" letter and refused everything he sent me with big, bold "Return to Sender" in indelible ink. I kept only the box of dried roses . . . as a reminder.

          His mother called to tell me he had been killed. I didn't ask how he had died; I didn't care. It was enough to know that he was gone. She wept because war was so cruel. She missed him. She told me how much she loved him. She reminisced about his childhood. He had been a child who wet the bed and she tried everything to make him quit: punishment, sleep deprivation, electric shock coils and ultimately making him sleep in the bathtub with no pillow and no blankets. He was four years old. She did it because she loved him. When he was five they discovered he had something wrong with his kidneys and he had surgery. He stopped wetting the bed. He had never told me. I hated her for destroying the life of a child and for almost destroying me. I hung up on her and her grief without saying goodbye. I didn't go to the funeral. I didn't care what anyone thought. I couldn't stand the thoughts of a eulogy and I would never speak to his mother. What could I possibly say to her?

          Instead, on the day of his funeral, I took the shoebox and went to the river. I went to where we used to have picnics on the beach with friends. Where everyone else laughed and played and went swimming while I sat on the sand all covered up with long-sleeved clothes so no one would see the bruises. I claimed I didn't want to swim and they always believed me. I had become an accomplished liar to protect myself/Adonis. His funeral was in the fall, late October, and I was seventeen. I stripped down to a swimsuit. I found a log overhanging the water and sat with my legs tucked up under my chin and my arms wrapped around my shins. I sat for a long time shivering, watching the little waves ebb and flow, my soul disarmed. I finally opened the shoebox and took out the roses. I no longer needed their reminder. I would not forget that I was strong. I would never again submit to tyranny. I would not carry the guilt of the world. I would not be afraid of the truth nor be afraid to tell it. One by one I plucked the dried, pink-brown petals and dropped them into the water. They caught in an eddy and swirled back under me, moving circularly upstream before catching the current. Slowly they spiraled out, stretching in a wavy line reaching out to find the sea. A strip of faintly pink dead dreams joining the glow of the westward setting sun. I rid myself of the lie petal by petal and watched as they joined the softening shadows of eternity, no longer nightmares. Illusions are hard to discern and, because they are not true, they are equally as hard to dispel.

          "Don't jump!" my favorite librarian admonished me with her friendly smile.

          "I was just looking at the petals on the pond," I smiled back and shook my head to clear my thoughts.

          She peered over the balcony railing. "Oh, how pretty!" she exclaimed, looking down into the water. "I'm always so busy I never take time to look at the atrium from up here. Aren't the petals beautiful? It's so serene."

          And I guess it was.