The following creative writing thesis is an artistic interrogation of various mediating affects in personal relationships, including: language; illness; cultural constraints; memory; the challenges of love, care, and communication; as well as displacement, loss, racism, and other damages from war. The interrogation is presented as a sequence of four playlets, theoretically framed by an introductory essay. Besides providing personal justification for the creative work, as well as notes on the genre, the introduction functions as a philosophically interpretive guide, offering a loosely psychoanalytic and existentialist investigation of certain problems of potential entrapment, or liberation within connotations of language and disparate meaning systems — especially pertaining to narrative identity construction. The thesis should reveal that certain conditions of existence (i.e., the inevitability of suffering, disconnection, sickness, loss, or death) are not so much changed through narrative, as the experience of events of self and other might be potentially altered, within a co-creative and malleable meaning system, in which actualized connection (in part through empathy) can provide a strong antidote to isolation.