This is SO fucked up.
So those of you who know me & hang out with me locally know, I've been pretty much putting back together my life since Z left. I was bummed for a short while, because it seemed so fucked up for someone I had been friends with for ages to get weird and lash out, but as those of you also know, she's been pretty crazy for awhile now.
I was sad a few days, then kinda realised that I had been putting up with her crazydom hoping she'd get it together for like, going on 2 years now. The Z I knew has been gone awhile. And I had no need for the Z that was left, a spiteful and lazy caregiver who was refusing to give any care, and would talk back as though I was the stepmother she still had issues with and she was the rebellious teenager who shouldn't have to put up with grownups bossing her around.
Anyhoo, I've been trying to clean up the mess. Z had stopped doing housework and since I have (worsening now) arthritis I was kinda stuck leaving it this way. I've gotten a lot of help from some cool friends who saw what was going on with this. Dorothy's helped me clean stuff, Galen, Alacia... I hung on to Z's stuff waiting for her to make some kind of contact to reclaim it. Having to clean it up was a hassle too, I can tell you! It saddened and sickened everyone who saw it to see how poorly she treated her possessions! and how much of MY house was cluttered with them. Theoretically, since Z had no official residency I didn't have to wait 30 days, but that's the legal limit before you cast out a roommate's gear if no attempt to gather it or pay for its disposal has been made. I waited it, not because of legalities, but because I DID in some sense still miss my pal. I still do. I really wish she would have come to her senses and got some help- with her depression, her anger, her paranoia, her body dysmorphia, and her drug abuse. But whatever. It's not my problem anymore.
So, I was out shopping to-day with Tobias. Like said, a lot of my friends have been really supportive about all this, because they are actual friends, you know? When I got in, I had a bunch of bags of stuff to sort and put away, but I noticed there was a message flashing on my phone. I figured it was my friend Aria, because we were supposed to hang out later. It wasn't.
Instead it was a message that had been erroneously sent to my phone because Z hadn't bothered, apparently, to mention she doesn't take messages here anymore. It was a call from a worker at one of those abuse clinics that finds safehouses for battered women, telling Z that they had accomodations for her for the next two weeks they couldn't disclose over the phone.
WTF?! I put this person up for ages. All they had to do was houseclean and do a few chores now and then. I fed her on my dime, hung out with her, listened to her ramble about things that didn't interest me, and had supported her through the beginning of her mental illness when she was sure the neighbours were zapping her through the floorboards and were paying people to kick her teeth in. I remember once having to do a 48 hour suicide watch because she was determined she should go out there and kill her imaginary attackers and then herself. So when she'd move, I'd move, to make sure she didn't dash out of the house with my kitchen knife, which she refused to relinquish the whole time.
And now she's faking out a valuable community service by pretending I abused her.
I don't know. I just don't know what to do. A part of me very much would like to sue her for libel, excepting of course I don't keep records of things, and it'd be a huge dragout of he-said she-said nonsense, at the end of which I'd get nothing, because of course she wouldn't pay any of it, I've no doubt. And then of course there'd be the hassle and anguish of now-we're-ENEMIES Z taking potshots at me and trying to piss me off.
I don't know. I don't know what to do about this. Except obviously I'm pretty upset, and I'm very disappointed that anyone would sink that low.
Especially someone I'd done so much for for so long.