What Are Friends For?

Abstract

As social beings, nearly all of us find that the development of individual identity requires an acceptance of others\u27 influence, whether good or had. The specifics of self-concept, as we typically understand the term, can only exist relative to one\u27s perceptions of outside selves, in all their likeness and, more importantly, dissimilarity to our own. To know what we are is to know what we are not; These eight, highly disparate works of short fiction all seek, in some way, to describe the evolution of individual identity that results when separate paths cross, with a broad emphasis on the by-products of our inevitable, frictional resistance to that evolution: sensations such as fear, love, anger, joy, epiphany and humiliation. It is the author\u27s intent with these stories to provide an imaginary, yet truthful, sampling of such experience with the hope that a reader may empathize