The Keeper of Happy Endings

by Barbara Davis

There is a grief worse than death. It is the grief of a life half-lived. Not because you don’t know what could have been—but because you do.

It’s a contradiction that is part of every woman’s journey—the need to shape in one’s own image versus the aversion to being shaped at all.

“In France we say, tu me manques. It means ‘you are missing from me.’ Not I miss you—the way Americans say it—but you are missing from me. The part of you that is a part of me . . . is gone.

Because we’ve discovered a new kind of magick—the kind that comes with choosing for ourselves, with saying I will do something else, be something else, have something else.