I once knew a woman, with blood on her hands.
Never did she falter to your demands.
She was high-strung.
Even with the torment that she lived amongst.

I met her in college.
Her past she was trying to demolish
Keeping busy was the only thing that kept her wolves at bay.
With guilt, her mind was heavily weighed.
She was studying medicine.
When she wasn't studying she sat behind an engine.
She was a paramedic
For her patients she was sympathetic.
Always on the go,
In hopes that no one would ever know,
There was a pain in her that continued to rise.
She hid behind her guise.

She was a young veteran.
Front lines of her division.
The many losses she witnessed.
She didn't have time to weep for the lifeless.
Moving forward without her friends.
Because of a nation she swore to defend.
The weight of the world was on her shoulders.
A hardship for her as a soldier.
Never took lightly of loss, friend or foe.
Because of this, she denied being a hero.
In many ways, she would be defined as a heroine.
But after all the trauma, she was a hero, that she could never envision.

During the pandemic, she fell through the cracks.
Fighting an internal battle with vivid flashbacks.
Fire was taken on from almost all sides.
It was the day her friends lost their lives.
Going to therapy didn't always work well.
And her prescriptions piled up on the shelf.
They didn't take the pain away.
Her mind was the hunter but she was the prey.
Continuing through the heartache,
She could no longer take it.

Turning into someone she never knew.
From college, she withdrew,
Leaving her job on the shelf with her medications.
Cutting off all connections.
The light was slowly fading,
But the war inside kept raging.
Acquired a self-destructive habit, while in a haze.
This decision left her in a daze.
An awful trade-off.
At first, it took the edge off.
The needle was pulling all the strings
Her soul it clenched, caught amongst the trappings.
Nothing but a pawn.
Too far gone.
Looking up to an object that had complete control.
Even a god was not able to console.
She took her life,
But not with the blade of a knife.
Tears unspoken with a drug so brazen.
Heroin was never her heroine…


© A. Tenney