Part 3:
After about a week of the same pattern — me making plans alone, her criticizing them or guilt-tripping me into paying for her — I finally snapped and asked her to just go home.
That’s when the fight happened.
Suddenly, the three-week trip she’d personally told me was “perfect” became my fault for booking too long. Suddenly, all those messages of her begging me to come, promising she’d take care of everything, telling me how grateful she’d be — messages I still have saved, word for word — apparently never happened, according to her. She told me she never promised me anything. She told me I was stressing her out. She told me I was a terrible person for “using my money against her,” and that she was financially struggling.
The same friend who had just spent days shopping and touring around Jeju.
We ended up apologizing to each other, the way you do when you don’t want to admit the friendship is already over. She made an itinerary. We had one genuinely good day together. And then, almost immediately, we were right back to the same routine — no plans, no effort, just me footing the bill for a “personal tour guide” who’d stopped showing up the moment we landed on the mainland.
By the end of the trip, I wasn’t even surprised anymore when she told me she couldn’t afford to come with me to the airport.
This was my first time traveling internationally. She knew that. She knew I was nervous about navigating an unfamiliar airport alone. And I have a strong feeling she wasn’t just telling me she couldn’t come — she was hoping I’d offer to pay for her fare there and back, the same way I’d been quietly covering things the entire trip.
I was so done by that point that I just told her it was fine.
So there I was — three suitcases, a first-time international traveler, no local friend by my side — figuring out a foreign airport completely on my own. And somehow, I did it. I checked in, found my gate, and got myself onto that plane without the “personal tour guide” who had begged me to come to Korea in the first place.
While I was waiting to board, my phone buzzed. A text from her, wishing me a safe trip home, going on about how much fun she’d had in Jeju.
Not a word about the other two and a half weeks. Not a single acknowledgment of the fact that I’d navigated most of the trip alone, in a country I’d never been to, while she sat a few feet away on her phone. Not one mention of the fight, the guilt-tripping, or the airport she couldn’t be bothered to show up for.
I looked at that text for a long moment. Then I left her on read.
I think about the trip sometimes — not the parts with her, but the parts I ended up having despite her. The strangers in Jeju who went out of their way to make me feel welcome. The places I found the courage to explore on my own, even when I was scared. The airport I somehow got through by myself, three suitcases and all.
She promised to take care of me. In the end, I think I took care of myself just fine — I just wish I hadn’t had to pay so much, in every sense, to learn that.
