810: Say It to My Face

Ira Glass

A few months ago, somebody said something to me that I found so humiliating that I have never talked about it. Not to anybody. Not even with the people I love the most. This is way too embarrassing. It makes me wince even to think of it. But telling my loved ones and my friends, that's real life. Those are people I have to live with. You and me, here, right now, on the radio, we have a different kind of relationship, right? I can tell you.

So this thing happened while I was still riding around the city on this poncy little folding bike, which looks ridiculous, and there's no dignity to it, but it is handy to have a bike that folds up if you live in the city. And it was maybe 9:00 PM. And I was riding home from work, and I was wearing a suit because I'd been to work. And that morning, it had been cold, so I wore a coat, even though now, at night, it was warm enough, so the coat was unnecessary, but it was just easier to wear the coat than to be carrying it.

I was also wearing one of those-- you know those reflective orange and yellow vests? I was wearing it because I'd had three bike accidents, thanks to the fact that the folding bike loses its grip on the street in the rain. Extra precaution seemed worth it. I don't know. I have gray hair at that point, a neatly trimmed beard. I was wearing a helmet. All in all, I was a picture of fastidious care.

I was going south on Avenue B. I was between 3rd and 2nd Street. A young woman was traipsing across the street, not wearing a coat, full of cheerful, loose energy, bright eyes. She sees me on the bike. I am this locked down, buttoned down, helmeted, overdressed, gray-haired man in a reflective vest. And as I rode past her, the thing she says to me is, "Do you fart out the front?" That's all she said. "Do you fart out the front?"

It was really kind of stunning. [LAUGHS] As an insult, it's both incredibly efficient and deeply mysterious. I don't even get what image she's trying to convey, in a literal sense. But I do think I get the feeling she's going for, and it's not respectful, you know? It's kind of like, you fussy, foppish, overcareful old man.

And can I say, that thought she had, she could have kept that to herself. I think all kinds of things about people on the street all the time. I keep those thoughts to myself. I do not say those things to people, to their faces, because they are strangers. They are complete strangers. They don't need to know.

But of course, it is so much easier to say what you really think with a complete stranger. With our friends, with our loved ones, it can be so much more difficult to be honest, sometimes. Right?

When somebody you really know and you have some tough truth that you need to talk through with them, the math of figuring out when to tell them and what to say and should you actually get into it and say anything at all, it can be so complicated. Like, sometimes you tell them, and the two of you talk it through and work it out, and it is relationship changing. It's vital. It is so important. And sometimes, annoyingly, it fucking blows up in your face.

Today, on our program, we have stories of two friendships. And in each of these friendships, one of the friends has something to say to the other, something big, and they have to decide, do I say it to their face? In each of these stories, they make a decision, and then that is actually when it gets interesting. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act 1, "What Are Friends For? No, Seriously. What are They For?" So we start today with somebody who had something that he needed to talk through with his friend. And rather than have the tough conversation and get things off his chest and come to some new understanding, he did not do that. No, no, no. Instead, he stewed about it for years. And then he talked about it to everyone, everyone, but the one person that he really needed to talk to. Aviva DeKornfeld explains how that worked out for him.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The thing Gabe Mollica accidentally got stuck thinking about was a friendship breakup, and he got stuck there for a long time, eight years. And then he took all those thoughts and did the thing that only a former theater kid would do-- he compiled them into a one-man show. That's how I first heard about this story. I went to see Gabe's show one night because friendship is something I'm stuck thinking about, too. I recently went through a friend breakup myself.

Gabe's a small-time comedian, lives in Queens. Has a day job teaching kids how to write essays. And he starts his show by saying he doesn't have any real friends. What he has is a group of bros-- his word-- from high school. And his relationship with them is very stereotypically bro-like.

They do lots of activities together-- watch sports, play video games-- but never get into the nitty gritty of what's going on in one another's emotional lives. Like, for example, in the show, Gabe describes spending the whole day with his closest friend of the bros, Nick, and then afterwards, going over to his parents' house in Long Island.

Aviva DeKornfeld

But then something hard happened. And for the first time in his adult life, Gabe needed more from his friends than just a good hang. What happened is, his mom got sick. She checked into the hospital, and for weeks, doctors can't figure out what's wrong with her. One afternoon, Gabe leaves the hospital to go walk the family dog, and it's his first real moment of quiet since everything happened. He talks about this on his show, and I asked him about it. He said he texted Nick to update him on his mom's status.

Aviva DeKornfeld

When Gabe talks about this in his show, this is where he pivots. From here, it turns into this long ode to the only friend Gabe had ever had who would have known what to say when his mom got sick, this guy named Tim, who he'd broken up with years ago, but still hasn't gotten over because of the abrupt way it ended. It's haunted him for years. This is the thing I'm going to tell you about-- Gabe's one emotionally intimate friendship with another guy and the conversation they should have had that could have changed everything.

Gabe met Tim his sophomore year of college at Hamilton in poetry class. Gabe noticed him right away, because he managed to analyze poetry in a way that somehow didn't feel pretentious. He seemed sort of casually brilliant. So one day after class, Gabe strikes up a conversation with Tim. They walk across campus, talking.

Tim tells him that he played varsity baseball in high school, which is very impressive to Gabe, because while he'd happily accepted his fate as a musical theater nerd, he still hadn't quite kicked that straight guy urge to be good at sports. Tim, then, asks Gabe what he did in high school.

Aviva DeKornfeld

From there, Gabe and Tim fell into that kind of all-consuming friendship you fall into when you're young, when you have time for that kind of thing. This newfound relationship felt different from Gabe's high school friendships. He and Tim could talk about real stuff.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Tim and Gabe would regularly stay up till 4:00 AM, smoking clove cigarettes and debating the kind of stuff you debate about in college. A year passed like this. Then Tim invited Gabe to come work with him at the summer camp for kids with chronic illnesses.

Gabe joined him and found he loved it, in part because one night at camp, Tim introduced Gabe to another counselor, Kate. Gabe remembers Tim telling him, you're going to love Kate. She's our kind of person. Tim was right. Gabe and Kate talked for hours. And at the end of the night, they walked back to their bunks together.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The rest of the summer is dreamy. But Gabe has to leave camp a couple weeks early to start a teaching job in Scotland. He and Kate stay in touch. They're actually in contact all the time, texting, emailing, sending poems back and forth. But the more time passes, the less into it Kate seems to be. Eventually, she calls Gabe and breaks things off.

Gabe was upset and wrote to Tim to tell him the news. Tim responded, saying he was sorry to hear about Kate and that he loved him. Tim and Gabe and some of their camp friends had planned a New Year's trip to reunite in Edinburgh, but when they arrive, it's not fun at all, at least not for Gabe. All he wants to do is hang out with Tim one-on-one and talk about Kate, but--

Aviva DeKornfeld

Finally, days into the trip, Tim asked Gabe to hang out, just them. Gabe is thrilled. It feels like the trip he actually wanted to have is finally starting. They go to a casino, then walk back to Gabe's apartment, where Gabe starts making them a late night snack.

Aviva DeKornfeld

I did talk to Kate about all this. She said she had liked Gabe. But when she fell for Tim, it felt like they were beginning the big relationship of their lives. And that's what Tim tried to emphasize to Gabe. But even with that being the case, it's pretty intense to say, I'm not sorry.

Aviva DeKornfeld

This is what Gabe can't wrap his head around-- why Tim did it in this way. He could deal with the breakup with Kate. There's a script for that kind of heartache. It was Gabe's breakup with Tim that really hurt because it wasn't supposed to happen. It's not part of the friendship contract. It felt impossible to square the coldness of what Tim had done with the guy Gabe believed his friend to be.

Eight years have passed since then. Gabe keeps expecting him to reach out because in Gabe's mind, Tim's the one who broke the relationship. So it was on him to fix it. But they still haven't talked about what happened. Even though Tim and Kate broke up years ago, they'd been engaged before that. In Gabe's show, he tells the whole story, how he and Tim met, camp, Scotland, why they stopped talking, and what he wishes he could say to Tim now.

Watching Gabe on stage, I was struck, but not surprised, by how much brain space this all still takes up for him. I know from my experience, when an important relationship implodes, detonated by one spectacularly out-of-character decision, of course, you try to make it make sense. But it's exhausting to try and put a puzzle together when you only have half the pieces. So eventually, you have to stop looking for those other pieces and make a new picture with the ones you do have.

That's what Gabe's doing with his show. And he's hoping for something more. He wants Tim to see the show so Tim can understand what all this was like for Gabe and apologize for the way he handled Gabe's feelings. And then, maybe, he could imagine having him back as a friend. The only problem with Gabe's plan, he'd never actually invited Tim to the show.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Gabe's friends with Tim's mom on Facebook. So Tim must know about the show because you know, moms. Gabe assumed Tim would show up at some point. And a handful of times, he actually thought he heard Tim's laugh in the audience. It seemed crazy to me to put so much time and energy and money he didn't have into making something for essentially one person, and then stopping short of actually inviting that person to see it.

I'll be honest, if the thing Gabe complains about most is how men don't talk to each other about their feelings, I just want to say, dude, look in the mirror. Since he was never going to take the final step, just invite Tim himself, I asked if I could do it for him. After briefly panicking, he told me to make the call. To my surprise and Gabe's anxious delight, Tim agreed to come.

We were all set. Tim had his plane ticket to New York. Gabe had grabbed a slot at a local theater and started selling tickets for the show. And then, four days before the performance, Tim emails me at midnight and says he's changed his mind. He's not going to come. He'd realized what he signed up for, flying halfway across the country to watch himself portrayed as a villain in front of a live audience, and thought, why subject myself to that?

I call and text Tim, but get no response. And then, Tim finally calls me back the night before he's supposed to get on the plane to tell me his mind was made up. As it happens, Tim calls me as I'm on my way out. I'm going to a birthday dinner, where I'll see my ex-friend for the first time since she friend dumped me via text a year ago and then refused to discuss what happened.

I was nauseated at the thought of seeing her, and yet, I spent the better part of an hour pacing outside the restaurant, trying to convince Tim to see his ex-friend, knowing mine was just on the other side of the restaurant door.

Like, I get why he's saying no, but I tell him, most of us in this situation, we just try to avoid our ex-friend the best we can and occasionally suffer through awkward run-ins until one of us moves away or dies. But he and Gabe have this rare and kind of special chance to actually get some understanding. And I tell Tim, I hope he takes the opportunity. Tim's skeptical, but the next day, he texts me a picture from the plane.

Gabe heads to the theater early to get ready while I go collect Tim. Immediately, I see why Gabe liked him so much. He's warm and chatty, despite being visibly on edge. Tim and I walked to the show, talking about nothing, trying to pretend we're not strolling into a very strange situation. When we find our seats, I try to talk to Tim about how he's feeling, but he's distracted, looking around, trying to see if he recognizes anyone.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Tim spots Gabe's mom, and then the show starts.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Gabe begins the show breezily, and right away, there are some jokes that really hit for Tim.

Aviva DeKornfeld

I wonder if Gabe can hear Tim's laugh from the stage. Gabe tells lots of stories from their friendship, painting them as this kind of buddy comedy duo, if Dead Poets Society were a buddy comedy.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The show is not an 80-minute takedown. It's mostly about how much Gabe admires Tim. And yet, there are moments that are hard to watch while sitting next to Tim, like when Gabe recounts the night in Edinburgh when Tim came clean.

Aviva DeKornfeld

I'd pinned a mic on Tim, and the absence of sound coming from him during this part of the show was conspicuous. I'd spent hours talking to Gabe for this story, but sitting there, in the dark of the theater with Tim, no matter what had happened in the past, it seemed genuinely hard to be him in this moment. I don't think I'd appreciated the bravery all this required on Tim's part. Gabe finishes the show, triumphant. He later told me it was the best he'd ever performed.

Afterwards, Tim needs a minute to clear his head. He slips out for a walk while I stand with Gabe in front of the theater. Gabe is in the middle of showing me the clove cigarettes he doesn't smoke anymore, but bought for nostalgia's sake to smoke with Tim, when Tim appears, arms open, and pulls Gabe into a hug.

Aviva DeKornfeld

We drive to the studio and get right into it. Tim said it was strange to sit in the audience, hearing someone talk about him, knowing he couldn't respond. Of course, that didn't stop him from wanting to respond, like in the moment when it's revealed that he and Kate got together.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The two reminisce for a bit, and pretty quickly, it's apparent that Tim does not remember the rise or fall of their friendship in nearly as much detail as Gabe does. There was one part, though, that Tim remembered clearly. Tim had tried at one point, in his own way, to make amends.

A year after their breakup, he'd invited Gabe to a concert with music by the composer Edvard Grieg, which he chose specifically because there's this one song in that concert that meant a lot to both of them when they were friends. It's called "The Last Spring." Gabe first introduced the song to him in college, when he took Tim to a Grieg concert. And then a few weeks later--

Aviva DeKornfeld

This was the context Tim had in his head when he reached out to Gabe, thinking that maybe they could be friends again.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Something Tim and Gabe seemed to have in common is a kind of magical thinking. Tim had hoped that Gabe would understand everything he was trying to express-- complicated feelings, like love and remorse and nostalgia-- with what was essentially a link to Ticketmaster. Gabe had expected Tim to, romcom-style, appear unannounced one night at his performance without ever actually inviting him to a show or even telling him it existed. It's like each one had all the benefit of being heard without the burden of having to say anything at all.

The main thing Gabe wanted out of all of this was an apology for how Tim broke the news to him about Kate all those years ago. He thinks if Tim had handled it differently, they could have stayed friends. I know this is what he's waiting for. He's told me that. But an hour of circling around the topic goes by before, finally, Gabe brings it up, in a sideways sort of way.

Aviva DeKornfeld

I was surprised by how unemotional and anti-climactic the apology felt. Here Tim was, saying all the words that Gabe had wanted so badly to hear, and yet, somehow, it didn't feel like all that much. And I think that's because of this other thing that kept surfacing throughout their conversation. It's one of those awkward things that seems borderline cruel to bring attention to, but I'd be remiss not to ask. So, nervously, I do.

Aviva DeKornfeld

We wrap up our conversation shortly after this, but the question still nags at me. So I asked Tim about it again the next day, when it was just the two of us talking.

Aviva DeKornfeld

It was startling to see the truth of the matter laid so bare. Tim just didn't love Gabe as much as Gabe loved Tim. And really, an imbalance in love-- isn't that ultimately the reason that all relationships end? I ran this by Gabe, that maybe there was a mismatch in their feelings for one another or in how they understood their relationship. He rejected that idea outright. He says he was there. He remembers what it felt like.

Aviva DeKornfeld

I think a part of me had been jealous that Tim and Gabe got the chance to come to some understanding, a thing that my ex-friend made clear was not on the table for us. But it hadn't occurred to me that sitting down together and rehashing things might not lead to some sort of new common ground, that Tim could just strike a match on Gabe's memories and say, nope, you're wrong. It wasn't like that. I never felt that way about you.

If that's what happens when you try to talk it out, yeah, no, thanks. I guess that's the problem when you write a one-man show, hoping it'll prompt someone to tell you the thing you've always wanted to hear. There's no guarantee that they'll say the lines you've assigned to them.

Ira Glass

Aviva DeKornfeld is a producer at our show. Gabe Mollica's show, Solo, A Show About Friendship, reopens in October and runs in New York, LA, Boston, and Chicago. Tickets are at gabemollica.com. Coming up, can words succeed where sparkly platform shoes have failed? That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, Say It to My Face. We have two stories today. Each of them is about a friendship where there is something that the two friends do not see eye to eye on, and that something is so fundamental that talking about it seems just explosive. And the friends have to decide, do we discuss this at all? We've arrived at Act 2 of our program. Act 2, "Pinky Swear."

What's so interesting about the friends in this next story is that they talk every day. They are so close, best of besties. And yet, there is something that they have never talked about that is so big and so basic, that one of them wonders, are we really as close as I thought? Jasmine Garsd is one of the two friends. She's been on our show before. Jasmine lives here in the United States, in New York, but grew up in Buenos Aires.

Jasmine Garsd

On the day I left home, I sat in my kitchen with my best friend Gabbie. A taxi was waiting outside. We were leaving Argentina. I was 18. Listen, I said, barely able to make the words out without sobbing. There's something I want you to have.

Jasmine Garsd

What the hell am I supposed to do with these, he says he thought to himself. Before he could say anything, Mama stuffed some cash savings in a pouch under her shirt and yelled, let's go. My grandma, Grandma Iaia, held my face in her bony hand and whispered something in my ear. I turned to Gabbie and told him, I'm going to move back as soon as I can. I promise.

That was more than 20 years ago. Gabbie is still my best friend. We talk all the time about everything. He knows when I'm going to go get my pap smear. I know when he's had a bad day, just by the tone of his voice. By now, some of my facial expressions are actually his. They just stuck to me, like the way I curl my lower lip when I find someone annoying.

But as close as we are, we've never really talked about how I said I was going to move back, and I haven't followed through. It became a sort of unspoken rule. We cannot talk about this one small, enormous thing, until recently, when all the words we'd kept in over the years came spilling out. It happened by accident.

Of course, nothing truly happens by accident. We reached this boiling point by our own doing, by assuming we knew one another so well, we could read each other's minds. And to be fair, we often could. We've always understood one another instinctively, from the moment we met. We were 15. Back then, I mostly spent my summer vacations at the neighborhood park. That's where I first saw him.

He was lying out in the grass next to another friend of mine. A cigarette hung from his lip. He held a Quilmes beer in his hand. And I took one look at him and thought, what a badass. He took one look at me-- lanky, pale, blocking his sun-- and curled his lower lip. He was irritated.

Jasmine Garsd

Oh, look at this one. She looks too white. She must be insufferable. And just to prove him wrong, I took my first ever swig of beer. It was piss warm, but I chugged it down. This earned me some respect. We started joking.

We were very different. I was a scared and secretly angry, nerdy Jewish girl. He was a brown kid who was scared of being outed as gay. But we quickly signaled to each other that we both came from homes where there was a lot of arguing that easily boiled over into physical fights. The adults in our lives, they often behaved like terrifying children.

I want so badly to tell you that from that day on, we became troublemakers. But Gabbie was not the bad boy I thought he was when we met. We were not "el terror del barrio," rebellious teens.

Jasmine Garsd

We were, as he puts it, ninos señora, children who behaved like aunties. Our big act of rebellion was secretly drinking all of my mom's tea. We hung out in the park and just gossiped, smoking cheap national tobacco, ripping the filter off to feel tougher.

Jasmine Garsd

The park, it was our island. And on it, we shared our fears, our obsessions, and our escape plans, which always involved moving far away. Things were not good at home. My parents, who were professors, had been unemployed for a whole year. Gabbie's-- his dad was a cab driver, his mom was a secretary-- they were barely making ends meet.

Jasmine Garsd

Sometimes, he'd come home from the park and find there was just tea and bread for dinner. At the end of each night, we'd say goodbye, see you tomorrow. I'd go back home and sometimes slip into my Grandma Iaia's bed, next to her. She kept a tiny plastic radio under her pillow, which blasted the news all night.

And over the years, the news got increasingly worse. 10% unemployment, 15% unemployment, 17% unemployment. People started just breaking into supermarkets. The police responded brutally. They killed protesters just a few minutes from my house. We had three replacement presidents in the span of one month. Lying next to Iaia's radio was like falling asleep to a muffled doomsday clock.

By the end of the year, my family decided to go. It felt like now or never. At the time, there was an exodus out of Argentina. There was a saying I heard a few times back then, "el último en salir, apague la luz." Last one out, get the lights. In the days and weeks after my departure, Gabbie watched one friend after another pick up and leave. And he was still there. He says he felt anchored to a sinking ship.

Jasmine Garsd

I was angry, he says. I was frustrated. I felt like I was stuck in place. Everyone else could choose to go wherever they wanted, but not me. I have to stay here.

Jasmine Garsd

He dreamt of studying fashion, becoming a designer. But his mother had sat him down and told him university was not in the cards. They needed him to get a second job. So he started waiting tables. The tips were meager. No one was eating out.

Meanwhile, for me, it felt like I'd gotten thrown into the deep end of America with no life jacket. We lived in a motel in Southern California. I worked a lot of jobs-- dawn at a bakery, afternoons at the supermarket. Weekends, I sold cowboy boots at a store. Back then, Mama was always yelling at me. There was no A for effort. There was just, keep swimming or you'll drown.

Wake up, Jasmine. Enroll in community college, Jasmine. Go to bed, Jasmine. But before bed, I always tried to call Gabbie on Skype or with these international calling cards they sold at liquor stores. I'd tell him about whoever I had a crush on. He'd tell me about the pants he'd designed and made for himself.

In the background of these conversations, there was always my promise to return. Whenever I'd have a bad day, whenever my creepy boss would give me another unsolicited massage, I'd call and tell him, fuck this place. I'm so glad I'm coming back soon. Whenever Gabbie would have a bad day, when he'd get into an argument with his family or his boss would throw a tantrum, he'd sigh and say, can't wait for you to come back.

But returning at this point was impossible. I couldn't afford to even visit, let alone move back. We just needed time, we figured. I needed time. Two more years, maybe three. Three at most. In the meantime, I started making money. Not a lot, but I felt I could help my family for the first time. I started getting a taste of an independence I could never have imagined back home.

Still, Argentina was always in my rear view mirror, beautiful and resilient, alive, even in its wreckage. Gabbie would tell me about all these new things he was doing, poetry readings, a protest, a road trip. Everyone was hurting back home, but they managed to hustle and enjoy life. Meanwhile, me, I was making money in the USA, but the closest thing I had to a friend was the flatulent co-worker I took my cigarette breaks with.

It didn't matter, though, because I knew someday soon, I would make a U-turn. I'd move back. And when I did, I'd join Gabbie in his new adventures. Everything would make sense again. And I knew that coming back home could be done because I'd seen my own family do it. Back in the '70s, during the dictatorship, my parents had left Argentina, and they'd returned when it was over. Gabbie and I would always sign off our phone calls the same way. I'd tell him, see you soon. And he'd say--

Jasmine Garsd

Jazmina, my love, I love you to the sky and back. See you soon.

I went back to visit in 2011. I didn't tell anyone I was coming back, not even Gabbie. I thought it would be a wonderful surprise to just show up one day, unannounced.

That night, I got into the city, went to my aunt's house, ate something, and fell asleep. The telephone woke me up before sunrise. They told me that Grandma Iaia had been found at the foot of the stairway at her nursing home, unconscious. Her skull was cracked. She'd been rushed to the hospital.

In my memory, it feels like I'm running underwater, too slow to make it in time. And by the time I got to the hospital, the police had arrived. She had died. The circumstances were murky, and it could have involved violence, so this was now an official investigation. The cops wouldn't let me in. Dazed, I walked outside and looked for a public phone. There was only one person I knew to call--

Jasmine Garsd

Gabbie. He was asleep. It was early. I'm home, I told him. Home, home? Home, home. I need you to come to the hospital. When he arrived, I fell apart in his arms. In the next few days, I went to the police to badger them. Hey, when can I get her body back? The officer was too busy watching a soccer game to see me. I could hear them all yelling at the screen in the back office. I'd forgotten about this part of Argentina, how broken things could be.

At night, Gabbie would crawl into bed with me. We'd spoon and I'd cry, and he'd whisper, come on now, Jazmina. You know how things are here with the police. But all of a sudden, I had this deep, terrifying feeling of wanting to leave. I'd never felt that before. I didn't know what to make of it. And I couldn't tell Gabbie. I worried it would be too hurtful, so I kept it from him. I think it was the first time in my life I kept anything from him. He'd drift off to sleep, and I'd stay awake for hours.

A few days later, the cops called. I was to identify Iaia's body at the city morgue. Gabbie went with me. When they rolled out her body, Gabbie saw me drowning. He found my hand and whispered, Jazz--

Jasmine Garsd

--close your eyes. When he identified her body, he gave me a gift to remember her as one of the last times I saw her. The day I left, she was holding my face, whispering, "Jazmin. No te olvides de nosotros." Don't forget us.

After Iaia died, I felt like I had failed at the most important things, to hold on to the people I loved tight enough, to stay connected enough, or to, at the very least, go back home in time enough to say Como me voy a olvidar de vos. How could I ever forget you? Thank you. Goodbye. I felt guilty.

Gabbie and me, we still talked every day, but whenever it came up, me visiting or moving back, I could hear myself making excuses, even when they weren't exactly true. I can't afford a ticket. I don't have enough vacation days. Too much work.

And then last summer, I ran out of excuses. My job sent me to Argentina to report on the FIFA World Cup in 2022. That's when it happened. Gabbie and I, we finally talked about it, about how 20-some years ago, we sat in my kitchen, and I made a promise that I haven't kept. When I hopped out of the cab and saw Gabbie walk towards me, he looked as handsome as ever.

We almost immediately snap back into it-- goofed off, pretended to be gymnasts on the jungle gym. He's doing great. He's a modeling agent, which he loves. He's dating a really nice guy who forces him to eat healthy. Somehow, his childhood cat, Fiona, is still alive. It felt so good to just be together, like in the old days. And so I got that nagging question. Is it time to come back home? I blurted it out in the middle of our conversation.

There it was. Like a nervous tic, I said it, the promise followed by the excuse. I'm going to move back home. I just can't right now because of work, which is when Gabbie looked at me. His lower lip curled and finally said what he really felt. He remembers the moment as well as I do.

Jasmine Garsd

Come on, sis. Stop bullshitting me. Enough. Let's jump out of this loop we've been stuck in for years, where you say you're moving back or you want to move back, and it's like, it's not going to happen. Let's move on.

Jasmine Garsd

All of this, this was new information for me. Gabbie was doing this thing that, in Spanish, we call desahogarse. I suppose it translates into venting, but it literally means "to undrown oneself," to spit out everything you've been holding in, no matter what.

I asked him, were there moments where you felt irritated? Like, come on, girl. You don't have to keep saying this. We're good.

Jasmine Garsd

Gabbie says, of course. From the moment, I understood it. Like, every time you'd said it, I felt annoyed. Like, stop. Just stop. It was like, what is the deal here? What are you telling me this for?

Jasmine Garsd

It felt like you were saying it to calm me down, and I was like, no. Looking back, he's kind of right. I did say these things out of guilt. I tried to soften things by talking about how challenging it was for me up north, which he says actually didn't help.

Jasmine Garsd

It was hearing you complain about something I never had the chance to do. He didn't want to hear that, not when he was barely making ends meet. And he says the moment he realized that I was never going to move back was years ago when my Grandma Iaia died, the same moment, I suppose, it became clear to me.

Jasmine Garsd

It immediately hit me that you no longer had your grandparents here. So I was like, OK, nothing is anchoring her here. But you were here, I say.

Jasmine Garsd

Gabbie says, yeah, but as your friend, I mean, I wouldn't have wanted you to come back for me, not now. At some other time in my life, like if you had said this to me when we were 23, I would have loved for you to come back for me, you know? I do know. But I wasn't just saying it for him. I was also saying it because I was terrified. Terrified that I was drifting away, and I needed to believe I still had a home, a place where I fit in perfectly. I still want to believe that.

My whole body tensed up when I asked him this question. Do you still think of me as Argentine?

Gabbie said, don't take this the wrong way, but no.

Jasmine Garsd

He says, you are very Latina, but I don't know. Nowadays, I don't introduce you as my Argentine friend. You're my North American friend. I realized a long time ago, but without meaning to, I started calling you my gringa friend.

That son of a bitch. Being from Argentina is like my whole identity. It's like my theme song. That's how I think of myself as I move through my stupid everyday life. What the fuck? I've heard this kind of thing before.

My whole life, I had heard Latin Americans talk about US Latinos this way. People's voice would go down half an octave when they say, oh, so-and-so is Colombian, but from the US, like it's some kind of terminal illness. I guess I just didn't realize that now I live in the voice drop. Gabbie says he still loves me, even if there's parts of me that he now doesn't fully get.

Jasmine Garsd

It's OK for you not to come back for me, he says. It's healthy. I stopped waiting for you a long time ago. And so, in one fell swoop, he releases me from my teenage promise, which you would think was a huge relief. But to be honest, it feels terrible. Even as I say this, I keep thinking, but wait, maybe. Maybe I'll move back in a few more years. Maybe when I'm old. I don't want to be free from my oath, and I don't know where that leaves us.

Every time I think about my friendship with Gabbie, about what the glue is that keeps us together at a distance, I go back to this one memory. It happened back when we were kids, on that first day when we met in the park. That evening, there was a summer storm. All our friends ran home. It was just me and him. "El diluvio!" we yelled dramatically. The great flood. We laughed as we stood under a ledge to avoid the downpour.

I didn't want to go back home. I never did back then. I didn't have to explain it to him. We just knew each other profoundly from the start. He smiled at me, drenched. His brown eyes filled with mischief and said, Queres quedarte acá un rato más? Want to stay here a while longer? I felt the rush of excitement of someone who has just been spoken to for the first time. Yes, I answered. So we stood under the ledge together, watching the world around us come undone.

Ira Glass

Jasmine Garsd. She first interviewed Gabbie for her podcast, The Last Cup, La Ultima Copa, which I guess officially is about soccer star Leo Messi and Argentina, but really, if you hear it, is about so much more, about leaving home, about being an outsider in another country. It is available in English and in Spanish, wherever you get your podcasts, produced by NPR and Futuro Studios. Jasmine's story for our show today was produced by Nadia Reiman.

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Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Lilly Sullivan and edited by Laura Starecheski. The people who put our show together today include Bim Adewunmi, James Bennett II, Jendayi Bonds, Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Andrea Lopez Cruzado, Valerie Kipnis, Tobin Low, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Ryan Rumery, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu.

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Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

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