She told me she killed a man once,
As she cradled another drink.
Said she contemplated for months,
And then he pushed her to the brink.

No going back from that, she said.
No looking at life like it's peachy, she whispered.
Because dead is dead,
Her hand surely blistered.

She called him her demon,
That thing you try to run from all your life.
Said he kept her from freedom,
So she had no choice but grab for the knife.

I looked back at her, cold-faced.
But far from disgraced.
She was no less human than I,
No more flesh, with a hopeless cast in her eye.

I grabbed the drink out of her hand,
Saw the bruises where he surely left his brand.

I saw that look I see in all of these battered women.
That look that says it all.
Those eyes that speak of how they were driven,
To the end of their wake, to the beginning of their guilty fall.

I assured her she was a victim,
Someone swimming in tragedy.
I held her hand softly as she cried her repentance.
I stroked her hair as her mother once did so long ago.

Strangers we might be,
But disconnected, far from that.
She got lost in a sea,
That I so violently tried to combat.
She was losing this battle and losing herself in the wave,
And I did what I could to save,
All that remained in this broken spirit.
Taught her how to never fear it.

She did what she did to survive,
And though she made it back in tact,
Her spirit and soul were taking a crash dive,
As she tried to save her heart from becoming fully blacked.