#44 Sara

Yeah.

I was thinking of you last night.

You know why?

Why?

I couldn't sleep.

Yeah.

And rather than count sheep, I counted the toilets in your house.

And I fell asleep after six or seven.

But then

I couldn't remember.

How many toilets?

Is it again?

Five.

No, that doesn't sound right at all.

Count again.

Let's do it together.

The one in the basement, one on the ground floor,

the one on the balcony,

the one outdoors on the front steps before you come into the house,

the one on the roof.

There was the one.

Wait, what's that?

Like nine?

I already told you how many there were that you wanted to argue with me.

We're not having an argument, we're having a civilized conversation.

We could have a podcast called Toilet Talk.

From Gimlet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight.

Today's episode, Sarah.

Right after the break.

This is an iHeart podcast.

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This is Sarah Haybear.

Abear.

Hey Bear?

A Bear.

A Bear.

I see.

Okay, so the H is silent.

Yeah.

Silent because Sarah Abear lives in Louisiana and her family is Cajun.

Do you speak French?

I know enough French to know when my grandmother is gossiping about me.

When I was a kid, the adults would talk in Yiddish.

Could you understand what they were saying about you?

It was never great.

Yeah.

Sarah's here to tell me about a letter she received a while back.

Her husband, Chris, usually brings in the mail, so he was the one who first handed it to her.

The return address on the envelope said Abbeville, the tiny town where Sarah grew up.

So I open the letter and I pull it out and it's like, it is a handwritten letter.

Sarah says she can't remember the last time someone handwrote her a letter.

And then there was the handwriting itself, which was big and bubbly and written on lined paper, the kind torn from a spiral-bound notebook.

Like, I feel like I remember getting letters in middle school that kind of look like this.

Can you read it?

Yes, I'd be happy to.

So it says, hey, how are you doing?

It has been so long since I've seen or spoke to you.

You were my best friend.

My dad was Nick and my mom was Terry.

We got in trouble at my house one night when you slept over because we were rollerblading in the kitchen and we put down water all over the floor, which is like a very Cajun way of saying like we spilt water everywhere.

You were my very best friend and I don't really remember what happened, but I have thought of you often through the years, and I found you.

It would be so amazing to visit and get to catch up with you.

And then there's her cell number, her address.

Sorry, it's so weird to read this aloud.

And the reason it's so weird, Sarah says, is that she has absolutely no idea who this person is.

At all.

Like, I don't, I don't have a memory of her.

But that's not even the weirdest part.

The weirdest part, Sarah says, is the name at the end of the letter.

Sarah Aber.

Which is

my name.

In the letter, the writer refers to herself as the other Sarah Aber.

So wait a second.

So you read this letter, and at the bottom.

She signed it sincerely, Sarah Beth.

Abear.

So Beth with a T-H.

And my name is Sarah Bess

Abear, B-E-S-S.

It's literally like pretty much the same name, right?

What was your first thought, like, when you finished reading this?

Is this a scam?

Like, I told a couple of friends about it, and they were like, this is a scam.

They were like, this person's trying to get money from you or something.

Sarah's suspicions only deepened after googling the other sarah my generation of people we grew up on the internet right so like it's probably possible to find like a photo of me in my 20s i can't find anything on this person like i can't find like a myspace page or like

old internet forum post like

It's, it's bizarre to me that someone would be my age and not have some sort of trail on the internet.

The whole thing does sound pretty scammy.

And yet, for an entire year now, Sarah hasn't been able to throw the letter away.

There are parts of it that just feel oddly familiar.

Like when she says the stuff about rollerblading.

The more I read this letter, the more I'm like, something about that does feel true.

Like, I do feel like I got in trouble at some point for rollerblading in a kitchen when I was a kid.

Is it real or is it fake?

Sarah has come to me to render render a verdict.

And so, like any good investigative journalist, I defer to the experts.

In this case, the expert I turn to whenever I think I'm being scammed.

I would say that maybe three times a year you send me an email saying, is this a, am I being phished?

This is Alex Goldman, the former co-host of the Reply All podcast.

You get emails from like your wife and you're like, Alex, is this, she says I should bring home salmon.

Is this for real?

I look at a lot of things as a long con.

Alex once traveled all the way to India to investigate a scam call he received.

Scams are his specialty.

So I lay out the letter to him, the identical names, the torn notebook paper, the big and bubbly handwriting.

And then I await his ruling.

Okay.

I mean,

just no one sends a letter to try and scam someone.

Okay.

The thing about scamming is you do it because you think it's easy.

It's about getting stuff easily without having to work for it.

This is a lot of work.

Alex says scams aren't tailored to one person like the letter is.

They're more one size fits all.

Someone gets a big list of people and they email them all at once, trying to get as many people as possible so that you can catch a couple gullible people.

I've never heard of anybody saying like, I'm going to find someone and say, not only did we have almost exactly the same name, but we were best friends.

A scam would be to try and create loose ties rather than tight ties.

What if she just wants to reconnect?

What happened to you that made you so paranoid like this?

What happened to you?

After speaking with Alex, I deliver my report to Sarah.

The letter is not a scam, but this presents a new problem, one that might be more troubling.

If the other Sarah is real, then Sarah has completely forgotten her best friend.

How can a person person forget a whole best friend?

It turns out that for Sarah, a forgotten friend is just the tip of the iceberg.

I don't remember a whole lot for my life from

that period of time.

And part of the reason is just like, I had a really difficult childhood, like when my mom and my dad separated.

Just a lot of weird stuff that happened.

How old were you?

I was eight.

And so like,

ooh.

Sarah says she was thrust into the middle of their fights, forced to listen to each parent badmouth the other.

Things grew so bad that her mom and dad refused to go to each other's homes to pick up Sarah.

Instead, they exchanged her in a McDonald's parking lot.

Sarah has some memories from that time, but they're patchy and full of gaps.

My mom and I at one point like lived in a homeless shelter because like she was just trying to make ends meet as a single mom and like this was her solution to like put a roof over our heads.

And this is in like rural South louisiana so it's not like there are a ton of resources for families that live on the edge sarah has memories of her and her mom sleeping in the same bed she remembers playing board games and eating in the communal kitchen you know cajun culture is all about like food right so like we cook everything from scratch like it would be blasphemy for you to cook dinner for your family and for it to be hamburger helper

and i remember in the homeless shelter it was the first time i ever ate hamburger helper and it it was delicious.

Life with her dad wasn't any more stable.

Sarah's father remarried quickly and with his new wife operated a joint grocery store and bar, which they named the Lonesome Dove.

There was a lot of hard drinking and a lot of late nights.

I would spend the night on the counter of the grocery store, like with a sleeping bag.

And that's where I would sleep while they worked in the bar until late at night.

Hmm.

It It sounds depressing when I say it, but like, I really liked it because, like, I could eat all the candy I wanted from the store and like I could stay up late and watch like David Lutterman on TV.

What happens often is like, I'll tell my therapist some anecdote like this, and then she kind of looks at me and I think, oh yeah, that's like, that's sad stuff.

Like, that's stuff that a normal person would probably be like, that's effed up.

Yeah.

because you know, like

it was pretty messed up, like, some of the stuff I went through as a kid.

And that stuff, painful stuff, is being dredged up.

Since reading the letter, Sarah's begun remembering all the times she got sick.

I guess I puked a lot when I lived with my dad and my stepmom.

And

I remember that it felt like I was a burden whenever I was was sick.

Thinking about my hesitations around like, uh, you know, breaking the seal

on this part of my life, it brings up a lot of stuff that like I haven't processed.

Listening to Sarah speak, I realized that maybe it isn't so much a fear of being scammed that's kept her from responding to the other Sarah.

It's a fear of opening a door to the past.

For the most part, Sarah says the past is something she pretends doesn't exist.

Which sounds so ridiculous because, like, the past does exist, but like,

I can live in a world where like I don't have to deal with the implications of what has happened in the past, and maybe that's the way I should do it, right?

Like, because like it's gotten me through

to this point in my 30s, like, and

I'm doing okay.

Sarah's a college graduate a homeowner with a job she loves at a video game company and a husband she's been married to for 11 years she is doing okay

yet all the while the letter which has now been sitting on sarah's desk for about a year still calls to her what does the other sarah know about her life that she herself doesn't

clearly i don't want her to be hurt this is sarah's husband chris you know obviously i'm worried that just wandering into this, it might bring up a whole lot of other things about the tough parts of Sarah's past.

But

I think it'd be fun to just learn more about the good times that Sarah had as a kid.

And if I could learn more about Sarah's rollerblading days,

that would make me very happy.

So Chris hatches a plan.

He's like, you know, we could just drive down there and look at where she lives and see if it feels safe.

Together, they punch the return address on the envelope into Google Street View.

The house that pops up on the screen looks uninhabited, its windows dark, its front steps missing, the exterior peeling.

It looks like a haunted house, which for Sarah is disconcerting.

But it doesn't dissuade Chris.

He still wants to make the trip.

Though he does admit, there is a little something else motivating him.

I would love an excuse to go fill my cooler up with boudin sausage from my favorite sausage maker down there.

And so, early one morning in late February, Sarah and Chris load their dogs, Bowser and Noki, into the car for the three and a half hour drive to Abbil.

Noki, that's not where you go.

He's in the front seat, like he's gonna drive the car.

Their first stop, of course, is for sausage.

How many pals could I buy?

I'm trying to get a lot.

Sarah also wants to share with Chris some of her old haunts, so they stop by the Lonesome Dove.

The woman who works there now lets Sarah have a look around.

I don't remember the ceiling being this low,

but I was smaller.

You were small.

I was about to say, okay, you're my, but you might be a little taller now.

Sarah buys some candy and orders a hamburger.

Do you guys still make burgers?

Could I order one?

Later, Sarah tells me it tasted just like the burgers her stepmom used to make when she worked there.

Sarah and Chris also drive by her old school, Mo Elementary.

There is a sign that says they are currently raising money by cooking gumbo.

Gumbo for Mo.

They park, turn off the engine, and for a while they just sit there.

Does seeing this school bring back any memories of her?

No.

No.

next stop is the main attraction we're gonna go drive by Sarah's house

see look it is abandoned nobody lives in that house

but then as they make their way closer oh wait there's a house behind the abandoned house Chris the destination is on your left they live in that house out there the nicer one that's what's going on here Holy shit.

What Sarah and Chris couldn't see on Google Street View was the house behind the house, which has a nice yard and a car in the driveway.

It's full of life.

They have kids.

Look, kids bikes.

Wow, it looks so well taken care of.

It feels safe.

When Sarah gets home, she drafts a letter.

She handwrites it on a sheet of lined paper, just like the other Sarah did.

At the bottom, she signs it the same same way the other Sarah signed her letter, with her name, with their name.

Sarah Aber.

About a week later, Sarah receives a text message back.

It's a long, run-on sentence, like the sender was so excited she couldn't be bothered with punctuation.

Hey Sarah, this is Sarah, the text reads.

I would love to catch up, just text me as soon as you can, and we'll see to it that we can sit down and catch up.

I cannot wait.

And so, a date is set.

Sarah Bess Aber and Sarah Beth Aber will finally meet the following Friday.

But when the day arrives, Sarah receives a text from the other Sarah about a plumbing emergency.

The other Sarah has to reschedule.

So a new date is set, but yet again, the other Sarah is a no-show.

After that, she stops answering Sarah altogether.

Sarah sends more texts.

Months go by, and still, no response.

The situation between the two Sarahs has reversed, with Sarah now the one left waiting.

Has she somehow offended the other Sarah?

Is the other Sarah ignoring her?

Maybe she lost her phone and just isn't receiving her texts.

So once again, Sarah puts pen to paper and mails a second letter.

But still,

nothing.

You know, initially when we started talking, I was like, is this a scam?

Right.

It's a scam thing.

And talking to Chris about kind of how long this has been going on, he's like, I'm starting to feel like maybe there's something weird.

I'm also finding it weird.

Two months ago, the other Sarah had been so excited to finally connect.

So what happened?

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Hi.

Hi.

Happy New Year.

Happy New Year.

It's January 2022.

At this point, almost a year since Sarah first told me the story of the letter.

We catch up.

So let's just recap here.

You've moved since we last spoke.

I live in Los Angeles now.

Yeah.

Last summer, Sarah was offered her dream job at her favorite video game company.

So in August, she packed up her belongings, rented a U-Haul, and hitched her little smart car to the back of it.

Like a little caboose.

Yeah.

Sarah says moving to California is something she's always dreamed of doing.

There are more exciting things happening in the gaming world in LA than in Louisiana.

The job stuff has been amazing, but

in the process of moving out here,

Chris and I decided to get divorced.

Oh, geez, I'm so sorry.

Sarah says that Chris's whole world is in Louisiana.

In the same month Sarah was to move to LA, Chris was starting a grad school program in Southern Studies.

He's got a really great career and life trajectory back home, and I want him to be able to do that too.

Boy,

I'm sorry.

And I have to say, I'm, I'm surprised.

I mean,

there's a certain point in marriage where you realize like you really love someone, but you want them to be really happy.

And I think that's been at the core of what a relationship has been.

And

I don't want him to be alone, right?

Like, and I don't think I'm coming back.

Sarah is talking to me over video from her new living room.

There are palm trees right outside her windows, and the California sun is streaming in.

It's a lot of change.

It is.

Yeah.

And yet, on the other Sarah Aber front,

nothing has changed.

I know.

It's been 10 months without a word from the other Sarah.

But since moving across the country, Sarah's been thinking increasingly about home.

And with it, she thinks about her mysterious best friend, if she ever really was her best friend.

Since the other Sarah won't answer her, Sarah's considering the idea of asking her family if they remember the little girl named Sarah Beth Aber.

Specifically, she wants to ask her dad.

They talk on the phone each week.

But each week comes and goes without Sarah ever bringing it up.

Because

why?

Um,

that part of my childhood was really hard for me, and I, like, I don't think my dad ever realized it.

Maybe he didn't.

It had hurt to know for sure.

But one Friday morning, Sarah puts her fear aside, and she and I phone up her father.

Richard is a retired mechanic, known in his neighborhood as the guy who will fix anything.

Lawn mowers, chainsaws.

At two o'clock each day, his buddies come by the garage to hang out.

Are the guys going to come over or no?

Shit, yeah.

They'll be here.

We'll drink beer till about five.

With beer o'clock looming, Sarah gets right to it.

She tells her father the story of the mysterious letter.

So, do you remember anyone from when I was a kid who was also named Sarah Aber?

No, not really.

So, this is the kicker, Dad.

Her name is Sarah Beth, T-H Aber.

Come on.

It's kind of weird, right?

At one point, I mailed Sarah a letter back.

And when I went to the post office and I dropped the letter off, the lady was like, Why are you mailing a letter to yourself?

Yeah.

Sarah offers details from the letter in the hopes it'll spark something for her father.

But nothing rings a bell.

This girl got a good memory of neither one of me or you remembers her at all.

Do you think it's surprising, Richard, that Sarah just doesn't remember?

No, it doesn't surprise me because that era at that that time,

you know, maybe there's some times back then she didn't want to remember.

Oh,

is that the case for you?

Are there things that you just that you just would prefer not to remember?

Yeah, exactly.

Richard might not remember the other Sarah, but to Sarah's fear that her father never realized her pain, it seems like maybe he did.

We were going to a lot of turmoil back then, and

if

I felt it, I'm pretty sure she did too, because she was old enough.

Divorces and stuff like that with kids is not easy.

Yeah.

People get angry.

People do things that you wouldn't think they'd do.

Your grandma was,

she was hateful.

Yeah.

My grandma, Jonathan, like

really,

I think she had a mental breakdown after my parents got divorced.

This was your mom's mom.

Yeah.

She really went off the deep end.

I remember the time she pulled a gun on me.

You remember that, sir?

I do.

Was going to pick you up at her house.

She was just mad?

Yeah,

because we were in her yard.

Gotcha.

Then she drove up behind me and I couldn't get out.

That's when she pulled a gun.

And we ended up running over on some of her bushes so we could get out.

You ended up calling the cops that day, too.

She was so frequently

doing crazy stuff like this, Jonathan, that like the, I guess like the sheriff, do you remember

he would watch for me to walk from the school to mom's house because he was worried that she would show up.

Those times, Jonathan, you don't want to remember.

In fact, it seems like no one in Sarah's family wants to remember those times.

In the weeks after talking to her father, Sarah speaks with her mother and she speaks with her older sister, all in an attempt to see if anyone remembers the other Sarah.

But no one does.

Who was this little girl collectively forgotten?

At this point, the only person who can answer that question is the other Sarah herself.

I really want to meet her.

Yeah.

I mean, I just kind of feel like...

Whatever needs to happen to actually make it happen would be really great.

And so, Sarah sends out one last text.

I'm not hopeful it'll change anything, so I'm shocked when the very next day, after nearly a year of nothing, the other Sarah texts back:

I'd love to talk to you.

I'm sorry, it was a crazy year.

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The other Sarah says that since Friday's your day off, it's the best day to talk.

So once again, a plan is made for Friday.

It's now been nearly two years since Sarah first received the other Sarah's letter.

Sarah?

Hey!

Hi!

How are you?

And the two Sarahs finally meet.

I was so nervous, so nervous.

I was like, I'm excited, but I'm nervous.

I was like, it feels like a first day of school is starting a new job or something.

I was like, oh my God, I was so nervous.

The other Sarah is apologetic that it took them so long to finally connect.

But true to her last text, the other Sarah really did have a crazy year.

We've had a lot of issues this year.

My kids' dad actually passed away this year.

I'm so sorry.

It's difficult.

I mean, me and him weren't together,

but it's hard for them.

So it's kind of hard to watch them go through it.

It's really, really sucks.

Yeah, I bet.

Oh, my goodness.

I'm so sorry to hear that.

The other Sarah is raising three kids.

Her youngest is only a baby.

And for the past year or so, she's been doing it on her own.

I'm engaged, but

he had got in some trouble a while back.

So he's finishing his time in jail.

So he gets out in June.

So will you guys get married when he gets out?

Yes, we do plan on getting married.

This is so romantic.

I'm sorry.

I think it's very sweet.

Yes.

And you, what do you do?

How are you?

Do you have any kids?

I don't have any kids.

No, my husband and I are separated, which is a fairly new thing.

Sarah tells the other Sarah about her own crazy year, her divorce, her recent move, her new job.

The conversation feels like the kind between old friends.

Easy and familiar.

I'm wondering,

do you guys

recognize each other?

I recognize her.

I don't.

You don't.

I feel so bad, Sarah.

No.

Like, when I got your letter, it was like, I don't remember much of this

at all.

Sarah tells the other Sarah about her life back then, her parents fighting, her homelessness.

The other Sarah says she had no idea what Sarah was going through.

Oh.

And so, like, when you sent me that letter, I had this moment of like, I really want to meet this person

so that I can like remember this part of my childhood that I totally don't remember at all.

And so the other Sarah tries to evoke that childhood.

You can feel the other Sarah trying to drag Sarah from the fog of lost memory.

She describes who Sarah was.

Artsy, creative, a band kid.

She was quiet, but when me and her got together, we had a blast.

Like, it was just us cutting up, having fun, goofy, girls.

The other Sarah tells Sarah stories, like the famous rollerblading kitchen incident.

I got in so much trouble that day.

Oh my gosh.

She tells her about the sleepovers they had.

You had stuffed animals and stuff all around your room.

She reminds Sarah of the little loft space inside a guesthouse on her dad Richard's property where they'd spend the night together.

To get away from everybody, she says, like it was just the two of them in the whole world.

As the other Sarah talks, it becomes clear that while Sarah has been stuck for the last 20 years with all the sad memories she doesn't want, The other Sarah's been holding on to all the happy ones Sarah doesn't have.

For instance, in Sarah's recollection of those late nights at the bar, it was just the hum of David Letterman keeping her company.

But the other Sarah reminds her that she'd been there to keep her company too.

Like on the night they put on a show for the bar patrons.

Me and you actually went behind the counter and we were making little puppets out of paper bags and

we were putting on a puppet show for everybody in there.

It was pretty cool.

That's amazing.

It makes me me so happy.

I'm sorry.

I just keep like bursting into tears.

As the stories pile up, stories that span locations and rites of passage, Sarah has a realization.

We were friends for years, like a long time.

Yeah, we were friends for like four or five years.

The other Sarah says they met when they were eight years old.

She isn't sure how they met, but she thinks it was because her grandmother had owned The Lonesome Dove before Sarah's dad and stepmom did, back when it was called the Red Dog.

From then on, the two Sarahs were inseparable.

So inseparable, in fact, that their families had to devise a way to differentiate between them.

So they broke the name Sarah into two parts and gave each girl a half, Sah and Ra.

They used to call Sarah Ra.

Yeah, my family calls me that.

Yeah, so that's why they would call me Sarah and her Ra.

To distinguish you between.

between the two yeah when it was me and her together yep wow wow

and so given their closeness and the span of years the other Sarah has always wondered one thing why did Sarah stop being her friend it sucked whenever you like I

don't

It's hard to explain.

I don't know what happened.

I, you know, I don't know if y'all moved or something happened or, you know, and I know you can't remember and I'm not expecting you to or anything, but it seemed like you almost dropped, like seriously dropped off the face of the earth.

Although, of course, Sarah doesn't remember why the friendship ended.

Here's a theory.

In her early teens, Sarah learned about a Louisiana boarding school for the gifted and talented.

It was two and a half hours from Abbeville, and Sarah saw it as a chance to get away from the turmoil of home.

Getting into the school felt like a long shot, but she studied hard and she did get in.

It was at that school that Sarah met a computer science teacher who encouraged her to pursue coding.

Sarah says that if not for that boarding school, she might never have tried to get into college, and college changed her life.

She studied digital media, which put her on the path to video gaming, and eventually, to her new life in LA.

So taken together, the boarding school, college, It all meant, if not falling off the face of the earth, at least falling off the face of Abbeville, which left the other Sarah with nothing but a memory of the last night they spent together at the other Sarah's house.

She ended up getting sick that night.

And like, instead of waking my parents up to call her mom or anything, I like helped take care of her all night until the morning.

And then I went and woke my parents up and was like, hey, Sarah's been getting sick all night.

And my mom was like, I can't believe you stayed up all night taking care of her.

You should have woke us up.

I was like, no, no, she's my friend.

I want to take care of her.

i don't remember that but i got sick a lot as a kid doing exactly that i would throw up all night long and my parents used to be so mad at me about it

thank you for taking care of me well of course

i mean you were my best friend you were like yeah it was me and you

Sarah had been scared of reconnecting with the other Sarah because of what she might learn.

But what she's learning is that she wasn't alone.

I'm so sorry to know that she went through so much.

And

I wish we weren't so young and I wish I would have known so I could have helped or you know done something even though we were kids.

It sounds like you did.

Listening to the conversation, hearing Sarah flooded with emotion, it's clear what she's getting from the reunion.

But I can't help wondering what the other Sarah's getting.

She wrote her letter hoping to reconnect with an old friend.

But since sending it, she's learned the time they spend together, the bond they shared, that she herself have all been erased.

So, what, if anything, did Sarah's letter do for the other Sarah?

Especially seeing as how it reached her a year late.

Actually, it came at the perfect timing because I

it came

actually a week after I got out of rehab and it was my my light at the end of the terminal.

And when I came home and I got the letter from Sarah, it just showed me that good things can happen.

I actually cried when I got her letter because I was just so excited.

You don't know.

I'm so glad that you wrote me back.

I'm so excited for you that you went to rehab.

Congratulations.

I actually make, I make one year sober on February 11th, and I am super excited.

I am so grateful.

Everything in my life has changed, and your letter was the start of many, many good things.

Like for Christmas, my son wrote me a little Christmas card and it said, Thank you, mom, for the greatest year of my life.

And that meant more to me than any Christmas present or anything else that I could ever give them.

I don't want to get off the phone, but I know I have to go run and get some stuff taken care of.

But I mean, I'm all for doing this again, most definitely.

Same here.

And no matter what, as long as we can build our friendship from here, even if you don't remember the past, that would even be amazing.

I mean, I don't want to lose my best friend again.

Same here.

I'll text you so we can hang out again.

Most definitely.

Bye.

The other Sarah's screen goes black.

I think what I thought would happen in this call was like something would like click in my brain and I'd suddenly remember like

everything, but I don't.

A key that suddenly unlocks the past.

That's how it works in the movies.

But it isn't how the brain works in real life.

You don't talk to someone from your past and suddenly recover memories.

You can't recover what you never clocked in the first place.

There are studies that show that when people are confronted with an immediate threat to their safety, their focus on the danger impairs their ability to recall other peripheral details.

I was just asking her about like the nature of memory and like, why wouldn't I remember something good?

And she was like, you know, memory is like a camera, so it only captures like what you're,

what you're focused on at a time.

And she was like, if you were just focused on like, let me survive and cope in this scenario,

your camera probably just wasn't pointed at Sarah.

The two Sarahs met when they were around eight, the age when Sarah's folks split up and Sarah's life grew grew increasingly hard.

Sarah's camera was focused on the immediate threats.

The other Sarah remained out of frame.

What is the value of happy memories if you don't remember them?

After the conversation with the other Sarah, this is the question that Sarah is left to grapple with.

You know, hearing I had a friend that was like willing to take care of me all night long while I like puked my guts out, that's like amazing.

You know, that's like real friendship.

I don't know if I have adult friends in my life now who would do that.

To which, just before Sarah set out for LA, Chris told her he wasn't going to make the trip with her as planned, which Sarah says totally made sense given the breakup, but it left her alone.

None of her family or friends offered to step up.

But if that had happened to someone in my family or someone that I really cared about, I probably would have been the first person to step in and say, you don't need to do this alone.

And I would really like that

in any of my relationships, whether that's like with my family or with someone I'm intimate with or friendship.

I don't know.

I feel like for a lot of my life, I have wanted the people who are important to me to show me the investment and the love that is part of that relationship.

And I've spent a lot of my life not getting that from like

my parents or my stepmom, right?

And it's like, maybe I did have that person.

I think maybe Sarah was that person.

Sarah says she's learning to love her new life in LA, but still misses Louisiana.

She's planning to visit soon.

And when she does, she says she wants to see Sarah.

She's hoping this time they can meet in person,

not to uncover lost happy memories, but to make new ones.

Now that the furniture's returning to its goodwill home

Now that the last month's rent is scheming with the damaged deposit Take this moment to decide

if we meant it if we tried

but felt around for far too much

from things that accidentally touched.

This episode of Heavyweight was produced by supervising producer Stevie Lane, along with Mohini McGowker and me, Jonathan Goldstein.

Our senior producer is Khalila Holt.

Production help from Damiano Marchetti.

Special thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Bloomberg, Mimi O'Donnell, Sonia Dosani, Rosie Guerin, and Jackie Cohen.

Thank you also to Professor George Bonanno, author of the book The End of Trauma.

Bobby Lord mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K.

Sampson, and Bobby Lord.

Additional music credits can be found on our website, gimletmedia.com/slash heavyweight.

Our theme song is by the weaker than courtesy of Epitaph Records.

Follow us on Twitter at heavyweight or email us at heavyweight at gimletmedia.com.

We'll be back with a new episode next week.

This is an iHeart Podcast.