On a cold December day, parents grieve for their son who was killed in a football game. A friend of their son helps them realize their son may have hid the feelings he was too afraid to show.

The tragic loss of his childhood friend puts a boy on the path of religion - but his inner feelings remain as repressed and turbulent as they always were.

Three months after the death of his wife, a man tries to convince himself that he has not truly suffered a loss, all the while missing his wife more than ever.

As a woman grows older, she falls into a deep sadness while the men around her constantly tell her to cheer up.

A man walks with a writer around London who tells him about the novel he wrote that was lost which can never be matched in beauty by any other.

When a woman finds her purse stolen, she retraces the steps of her eventful day only to realize that the encounters, and her life as a whole, are empty and purposeless.

Asked by his therapist to tell a fable, a man recounts his unenchanting life as a lawyer married to a depressed, drug-abusing woman, with a disabled son he's struggling to raise. By filling his unremarkable story with sorceresses, magic, and true love, he attempts to romanticize a life he's desperate to escape.

While they were originally set on different paths after graduation, a young boy and girl get engaged. They decide to have their teacher as their witness, but once they discover their teacher had killed herself, they break their engagement.

After visiting his terminally-ill classmate, a man heads to his 50-year high school reunion in Pennsylvania and reflects on an afternoon that brightened his life back when he was sixteen.

A man learns the exact date and time of his death from a fortune teller, and, when the day comes, he visits his ex-girlfriend's house, hoping to turn it into a grand performance for her and her children.