▸ Column · Contemporary Tokyo, in the everyday-schoolgirl world of Sailor Moon
SAILOR MOON replies.
Replied to by Sailor Moon, with a rebuttal from Queen Beryl.
The letter
My best friend and I have been inseparable since high school — ten years now. Over the last two years I keep spotting her cash for little things: concert tickets, a birthday dinner she threw for her boyfriend, my share of a streaming account she promised to split. She's paid me back exactly once. By now she owes me somewhere around ¥38,000, and every time I bring it up she gasps, swears she totally forgot, says she'll send it tonight — and then nothing. Last week she asked if I'd cover her half of the deposit for our friend group's hot-springs trip because she's "waiting on a paycheck." The money won't ruin me. But the pattern is starting to make me feel like I'm a wallet she likes, not a person she respects. How do I say something without blowing up ten years of friendship over a few transfers?
Sailor Moon replies
Okay, confession time, because I can't sit here and pretend I'm the responsible one: in my friend group, I am the Priya. I'm the one who "forgot" my wallet again, who's eaten about four hundred of Makoto's lunches, who still owes Rei for manga I borrowed two years ago. So I know that forgetting can be careless without being cruel — your friend probably isn't sitting there scheming, she's just floating through, the way I do, never feeling the weight you're carrying. That part's real, and I don't think you should write her off as using you. There's a person in there who loves you.
But here's the thing nobody told me until my friends finally said it to my face: letting someone keep stepping on you isn't kindness, it's just being scared of the conversation. And you're allowed to say, out loud, "I can't cover the trip, and the ¥38,000 has been sitting between us and it hurts." Not as an attack — as the truth, trembling, while you're scared she'll be hurt. That's the brave version of love, you know? You can reach for her heart and still keep your own wallet closed this once. Both. I really mean it.
— Sailor Moon
Queen Beryl weighs in
How sweet — she casts your friend as a careless butterfly who simply "floats." Allow the queen a colder eye. The girl does not forget, child. She remembers precisely whom she may take from without cost, and she has decided it is you. People respect what they cannot endlessly drain. So: stop the flow. Not a tearful little confession — simply a treasury that has closed. Say no, and let the silence reveal exactly how much of this friendship was ever about you. ...I gave everything to one who would not even look back. A debt unpaid is a small, honest mirror of a heart unpaid. Do not keep feeding it. I know where that road ends.
— Queen Beryl
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