favors for friends

I'm pretty sure I'm breaking up with the person I've considered to be my best friend for the past 13 years. We've been growing apart, and as I've gotten older, I've realized the things that used to annoy me about her aren't really things that I want to deal with anymore. She can be moody, very bossy, and at times condescending like she's the adult and knows best. Mostly everyone I've told about my trip abroad to visit her has said she's lucky I was still her friend after that trip. Long story short, a mutual friend and I went to visit her and she kicked us out of her apartment on the first night in town because we were whispering while she was trying to sleep. She never even asked us to quiet down--I honestly thought she couldn't hear us with the fans/air conditioning blowing. It was a non-English speaking country and we were afraid so we basically had to submit to her anger over the whole situation because we knew no one and she was the only one who could help us get a hotel, etc. My guess is that she wasn't just pissed about us having been whispering, but from a mistake she'd made earlier in the trip where she showed up a day early to the airport to pick us up. I didn't apologize about it because it wasn't my fault she'd misread the itinerary; I have a feeling she was mad that I hadn't apologized and frustrated that she'd messed up. I've never seen her as rude and almost cruel as she was during that trip.

That was three years ago. Eventually after that trip I started talking to her again, but at first I would only respond to her, not initiate anything. Eventually time healed that wound and we were friends again. She came out to where I lived the next year and stayed for a few days. She was still bossy and kind of rude during that trip. Then she came a couple of years later and I introduced her to my new friends. Out came the rudeness again. She was mean to my boyfriend and my male friend.

Maybe the only reason I've been able to be friends with her is because of the distance. We've never lived in the same city, or state for that matter.

A few months ago she asked me for a favor. She wanted to know if I could empty out her storage. I drove out to her storage facility and went through and took pictures of all the things in the space, opened the boxes--everything. I uploaded all the photos and had her tell me what she wanted to keep and what I should get rid of. I made multiple trips back and forth and lived for a couple of months with her stuff sitting in my kitchen and in my car trunk while I tried to organize it and pack it for shipping.

Her dad sent me some money to pay for shipping. Unfortunately the first check he sent got stuck in the ATM when I tried to deposit it and the bank said they couldn't get it out. He sent another one for twice as much and with a note saying it was a bonus for me. Then the bank ended up getting the check out of the ATM somehow and deposited it in my account. She also sent me a check for shipping. This is where the trouble started.

Since I still had more stuff to mail her I gave her two options: 1.) I could write her dad a check for the amount of money in the first check since it had been found and deposited or 2.) I could rip up the check she had sent me since it was the same amount as her dad's first check and she could pay him back for me since I was spending that amount on shipping her things to her. Basically I'd be saying that since I owed her dad X dollars and she owed me X dollars, that she could just repay her dad to cover my debt to him. She told me to rip up her check, which meant she chose option 2.

I ended up spending all the money he'd sent, minus the "bonus."

Last week she came to visit me. I still had some boxes of her stuff in my kitchen and car but kept them so she could go through them and maybe carry some back with her to save on shipping. Instead, she just ended up mailing the packages to her house. She asked me if she was going to be able to use the money her dad had sent me, but I told her that it was all gone from all the other packages I'd sent, so she'd have to send it using her own money. Finally all the packages were sent and the only stuff that was left was a box to go to Goodwill and a bag of papers I told her I'd shred for her. I didn't feel like she should be spending her vacation in CA shredding her documents. I was doing her another favor.

So the day after she gets back home I get an email from her saying that she's talking to her dad and that he wants to remind me to send him a reimbursement check for the one that had been lost and then found and deposited...the same check that SHE was supposed to pay back since I'd ripped up the check she'd written me. She said he said I could also just send the money to HER. WTF?! I was so pissed when I read that. It seemed the only part of my email that stuck in her brain was the part about ripping up her check. She never even told her dad that she was supposed to pay him back since I hadn't deposited her check. She just didn't want to have to pay out of her own pocket.

This is weeks after he'd sent me the replacement check with my "bonus." So in this picture, it looks like I'm a crook who's holding his money hostage. I gathered all my receipts from the Post Office from shipping her stuff and attached them to an email reminding her that by telling me to rip up the check she's sent that she was agreeing to pay her dad back for that first "lost" check. I wrote a paragraph explaining the checks, the receipt totals, and the "bonus," including a direct quote from the handwritten note her dad had included with the replacement check.

Her response back to me completely ignored the part where she was responsible for repaying her dad and went straight to "I didn't realize you thought you were keeping it as a bonus" and ended with her saying she'd talk to her dad about it and how she didn't think he'd have a problem with my keeping that original money--the money SHE was supposed to pay him back. She made it seem like I had read some freaking tea leaves and they told me I could keep the money, or, that I felt entitled to keep it so I kept it. I didn't ASK for reimbursement! Her dad is the one who wrote the note with that "bonus" included! She's making it seem like I'm asking for money and she's also acting like I'm not believable. Most of all, she's just ignoring the parts where she has to claim some responsibility in the situation.

Fuck it. I'm just so tired of this bullshit. It's so offensive that I did all this work for her and spent all this time going through her dusty, moldy shit, just to have her not communicate clearly with her dad about the money he sent over and to make me look untrustworthy by not having sent him his money back. I did her a fucking favor. The least she could have done was to own up to having to pay her dad the $50. That would be the right thing to do. It's not even about the money at this point. I could take or leave $50. It's about how you're supposed to treat your friends when they're trying to help you out.