Honestly, Sandie

Pink Tourmaline belongs to a family of stones people confused for other gems for centuries. Emerald. Ruby. Sapphire. People saw the color first and named it wrong.

That tracks. People saw one color, gave it a name, and moved on. We do that with women too.

Pink Tourmaline and I were never simple. We were awkward before we were close. We were close before I understood why that closeness mattered so much. We were real, and we were complicated, which is rude because fake friendships are much easier to write about. Pink Tourmaline gets its color from pressure, heat, and trace elements buried inside the stone. Some friendships only show their real color after pressure exposes what was already in them.

This story begins in a hug.

Father’s Day weekend, 2023. The Sunday after the call that cracked everything open. The foyer was loud after service, full of coffee cups, kids, side conversations, and the regular church shuffle.

The building looked the same. That part made me mad. Nothing inside me felt the same, but the room had the nerve to keep functioning.

I found Pink Tourmaline in the middle of it and pulled her into the kind of hug we always had. Too close for casual. Too long for polite. We had always been that way.

People noticed.

Other women had said it before. “We’re not close the way you two are.”

They were right.

We were full-body-hug friends. Deep-conversation friends. Road-trip friends. Leadership friends. The kind of friends who stopped thinking about personal space because the friendship had already crossed that line years before.

So I held her there.

Inside that hug, the whole story showed up.

Before MOPS. Before church leadership. Before friendship. There was old history. She belonged to a chapter that started long before we were close, and for years she had been just out of reach.

I knew of her before I knew her. I knew pieces of her story. I knew enough to make things weird and not enough to make them normal.

Then came the birthday party.

Three weeks before MOPS started, she walked up to me and told me I should come. I asked what MOPS even was because, from the name alone, I thought we might be cleaning floors.

She explained Mothers of Preschoolers. Twice a month. Fun. Women. Community. Then she said the only part my overwhelmed mom-brain needed to hear.

There was food. So we went.

My sister and I showed up and were placed at her table. Of course we were. The room was arranged, and there she was, our table leader for the year.

I was nervous in a room full of women I did not know, and she was the familiar person I did not actually know. That is a weird kind of comfort. You cling to what you recognize, even when what you recognize makes you feel slightly unhinged.

She came across mature, friendly, prepared, and very put together. Even when she lacked confidence, she showed up polished. Some women can walk into a room and make “I have a clipboard” feel spiritual.

I made it weirder than it needed to be.

I was insecure, and insecurity loves a microphone. I dropped little comments that made it clear I had history too. I knew things. I belonged at the table. I was not some random new girl.

Gross? A little. Human? Very.

For a while, it was awkward.

Then it became real.

We bonded over faith, motherhood, ministry, longing, and the kind of conversations that make you feel known faster than you expected. She was goofy. She was thoughtful. She was organized. She cared about details in a way I admired and occasionally wanted to rebel against.

Pink fits her.

Not because the story is sweet. It is not.

Pink fits because she had a softness to the way she made space for people. When she was with you, she was fully there. She listened with her whole face. She made time feel intentional.

Her time also had edges.

She was structured. Her day had a plan. Her family rhythm mattered. Nap times mattered. The calendar mattered. I was more likely to throw my kids in the car and let the day figure itself out while I pretended that was a personality and not mild chaos in sandals.

Her structure could feel loving because she made room for you.

It could also feel like the room came with a timer.

That was part of the tension. She could be warm and hard to reach. Present and scheduled. Close and contained.

I loved her. I still do.

I do not regret the friendship we built. I regret the pieces I can see now. So much of it formed inside a system that taught us to confuse closeness with calling, loyalty with health, and proximity with proof.

At one point, she left.

She did not really say goodbye, and I was devastated. A lot of people were leaving then, and I already felt alone. Her leaving hit a place in me I did not have language for yet.

Later, I heard the church version.

She had been running from the church. From the pastor she had grown to know. The same one that told me he doesn’t talk to chicks.

Then she came back because that place felt like home. That is the part I understand and hate understanding.

I knew they were coming back into town after being away, and I went to the church trying to time it perfectly. I stood under the main entry awning, waiting.

I wanted to be the first face she saw. I wanted to pull her into one of our familiar, fully locked-in hugs and feel the friendship click back into place.

I had rehearsed the hug in my body before they even arrived. I knew exactly how I would wrap my arms around her. I knew the relief I expected to feel when I saw her. Then they slipped in another way, and I was left standing under the awning with a reunion that had nowhere to go. There is a special kind of stupid you feel when your heart shows up early for something the other person is trying to enter quietly.

I understood the pull of going straight to the building because I had lived inside that pull too. After babies. After road trips. After exhausting life moments when normal people would rest, eat, unpack, or sit down for five minutes.

We went to church because showing up meant something.

Showing up meant you were still in.

Then she told me about the hug.

Not ours.

His.

She told me she knew coming back was right because she went in for a hug from the lead pastor, nuzzled into his chest, and it felt like home.

I remember trying to keep my face still. Not holy-still. Not mature-still. More like, please do not let my eyebrows file a police report before my mouth catches up.

Because I understood the pull of that place. I understood the language. I understood how church belonging can get wrapped around your nervous system until someone else’s arms feel like proof that God wants you back in the building.

But I also knew too much by then.

I had sat in rooms where women’s concerns were handled like interruptions and men’s feelings were treated like weather systems everyone had to plan around.

I knew how certain men could build little kingdoms and call it shepherding.

In that world, the title did a lot of work. Put “pastor” in front of a man’s name long enough and people start treating his chest like a sanctuary.

So when she told me that hug felt like home, something in me went quiet.

Not because I stopped loving her.

Because I started seeing it.

That is the ache of this story: I still love you, but I see it now.

I see how much we were both trying to prove.

I felt like I had won her over. We were not friends, and then we were. I proved we could be. She was proving she could be my friend.

She was a yes girl in that season. She would load up her kids and drive me two hours away for a fun road trip when I could have driven myself. She chose me to lead with her when I had no experience in the field.

She pulled me close, and I let that closeness feel like a trophy.

Having her close felt like proof that old history could be redeemed. Proof that I was lovable. Proof that I could win over someone who once felt unreachable.

I wanted that proof more than I knew.

The friendship became real. That is what makes it hurt.

If it had all been fake, this would be cleaner. It was not fake. It was mixed. It had more than one color in it.

We led together. We served together. We worked kids summer camp together. We built things side by side. She knew me, and I made space for her in places where other important relationships used to be.

I do not regret the relationship.

I am sad she does not reach for it anymore.

That is what changed when I left.

Not when she left. When she left, I still loved her fully. I still wanted her close. I still believed we could find our way back.

When I left, the shape of it changed.

Being on the outside makes me feel like a ghost in her life. Still present in old photos. Still alive in stories that used to have both of us in them. No longer someone she reaches for in the ordinary way friendship needs in order to stay alive.

Inside that Father’s Day hug, I felt the beginning. The weirdness. The friendship. The leaving. The return. The other hug. The no-closure. The way that place held both of us and called it home.

Then I told her this might be one of the last times she saw us in that building together.

I told her I loved her. I told her I wished she could see what I saw. She was valuable outside of that place. I understood why leaving would be harder for her because her family was still so connected there.

I told her I did not blame her for staying.

I needed her to hear that.

Then I told her what had happened.

The call. The position. The way my husband had been cut loose in the middle of a Tuesday, after years of serving, with no real closure and no room for a proper goodbye.

Her eyes filled. Her mouth trembled.

Mine did not.

That still surprises me because I am usually the emotional disaster in the room. But that day, inside that hug, I was steady.

Nobody called it closure. Nobody offered us that. Nobody pulled us into an office and said, “You mattered here, and we are sorry for how this ended.” So I made the only closure I could make. I held my friend in the foyer and told the truth before the room could swallow it.

The hug ended.

I stepped back and looked at her. She was holding back tears, but I was still calm. Then I looked past her and saw my husband waiting by the doors.

So I walked to him.

I took his hand.

We stepped through the exit together.

That is when the tears came.

Not cute tears. Not one dignified church-lobby tear. A flood. My sunglasses were on, and I needed them.

I held it together in her arms.

I broke when I reached his.

Some friendships do not end because the love runs out. Some end because the room that introduced you cannot survive one of you leaving it.

Pink Tourmaline does not get a song. The gemstones still inside that place do not get music from me. Not because they do not matter. Because the story is not released. The note is still hanging in the air. The door is still open on their side and closed on mine.

The ending is not clean enough to sing over.

That Sunday morning hug in June held the whole story: the friendship, the church, the goodbye, and the brutal little mercy of realizing I could still love her without staying inside a room that taught both of us how to disappear.