This thesis comprises six stories focusing on an art student, Georgia, coming to grips with her childhood friend's untimely death and the effects it had on molding her character and future. The introductory story, Warhorses, takes place years before the others and establishes the theme of the tragic consequences of familial love without communication or understanding which are particularly picked up again in Conversation Across County Lines. Pigments and Interlude With Melo deconstruct the modern metanarrative of friend-groups as an all-nurturing alternative to biological family while emphasizing their perhaps paradoxical importance nonetheless. Vinegar and Glance privilege fractured internal constructions of reality over a unified narrative to simultaneously explore the difficulties of memories carried imperfectly into the present and the seemingly impossible goal of true connection between human beings.