Amethyst (Sweet Nothings)

One time my friend pulled a kitchen knife out of her purse in a Taco Bell drive-thru.

Before anybody gets nervous, we were on our way to a youth group camping trip.

Which somehow raises additional questions.

I was driving and she was sitting shotgun and between the cashier handing me our drinks and our bag of burritos looked over and she pulled out a full size kitchen knife. I just remember sitting there staring at her and thinking, “Of course you have a kitchen knife in your purse.” But, my god, we were in Pasco and I was kind of scared for my life. She laughed and I think questioned my shocked face!

The funny thing is that if you met us back in 2010, you probably wouldn’t have guessed we’d become such close friends. She likes hunting and camping. I like air conditioning and indoor plumbing. She knows what’s for dinner before lunch. My family occasionally looks around at 7:00 PM and realizes we’ve all been operating under the dangerous assumption that someone else was handling dinner. She’s organized. I’m a collection of unfinished projects held together by caffeine and the super power we call procrastination. She could disappear into the mountains for a weekend and come home refreshed. If I disappear into the mountains for a weekend, somebody should probably file a report.

The first time she walked into my house without knocking, I didn’t know what the hell to do with it. Not because it was rude. Because no friend had ever done that before. I was sitting at my computer editing photos in our first rental house in Kennewick. The kids were little. Money was tight. Every flat surface in my house held something unfinished and life felt loud and messy and beautiful all at the same time. The front door opened, she walked in, pulled up a chair, said hello to our dog, Charlie, and announced she was there to hang out. I told her I was working. She said that was fine. Then she sat there for hours.

That sounds ridiculously simple until you realize how many relationships are built around needing something from each other. A favor. A project. A crisis. A reason. She didn’t need a reason. She just wanted to be there.

Years later she was still showing up in exactly the same way. When my youngest daughter was two days old, I somehow convinced myself it was a good idea to attend a women’s conference. (I was always trying to prove something.) Two days. After a C-section. With a newborn. There should have been an adult in charge of that decision and unfortunately it was me. At some point she came into my room in our hotel suite to wake me up and I immediately launched into panic because I had fallen asleep nursing the baby and one entire boob was hanging out. Full panic. New baby panic. Sleep-deprived panic. She looked at me, looked at the baby, looked back at me, said “you’re ok”, and continued the conversation like nothing had happened and asked me if she could get me some coffee.

Years earlier we were sharing a room at a conference in Texas. We were getting ready for a “mom prom” and by day four of the trip I was bloated. I had managed to put my shapewear on upside down… on purpose…because I was trying to solve one problem without creating six new ones. This made perfect sense to me. Nobody else seemed convinced. The conversation eventually turned into me insisting that my boobs were as big as my head. Nobody believed me. Scientific testing was required. Before we headed out for the event, actual human heads had been placed into the cups of my bra for comparison purposes. The findings were inconclusive. The laughter was not.

Long friendships collect weird artifacts. The time my husband accidentally stabbed her husband, which sounds significantly more criminal than it actually was. Her joking about my teen daughter drinking all of her milk after school.. “That’s how you make honor roll”, I would tell her. The lunch orders she could place without asking because she already knew I don’t eat ketchup, pickles, or basically anything that would make food interesting. The nights with cheap wine and good music where we’d sit around running our mouths for hours about kids, husbands, work, church, life, and whatever fresh chaos had shown up that week. The best friendships aren’t built from grand moments. They’re built from ordinary afternoons that somehow turn into someone you can’t live without.

One of my favorite things about her is that she never made me feel weird. Women know exactly what I mean by that. There are people who can make you feel weird about your parenting, your marriage, your body, your house, your choices, your mistakes, your successes, or your failures. Some people can make you feel weird about breathing. Not her. She had this way of making space for people exactly where they were. No performance required.

I still drive past that first rental house sometimes. Not on purpose. It’s just on the way home from work. Every single time my eyes drift toward it. Part of me is looking at a house. Part of me is looking at so many little kids as they were when I first me Amethyst. Part of me is looking at a woman who had no idea what was coming. The friendships. The heartbreaks. The rebuilding. The things she’d lose. The things she’d keep.

That house gave me a lot. That season gave me a lot.

One of the best things it gave me was her.

Her family left the church years before ours did. At the time I thought they were the ones walking away. I thought they were the ones who needed to find their way back. I remember standing at the altar one weekend asking for prayer and all I could get out was her name. That was enough. The prayer started immediately. Prayers that she’d come back. Prayers that she’d return to where she belonged. I believed every word.

The truth is, I didn’t understand their story.

I saw pieces of it. I watched opportunities quietly disappear. I watched promises get delayed until they were forgotten. I watched a family pour themselves into a place they loved. Then I watched them go through one of the hardest seasons of their lives.

There was a time when their business was struggling. A job had gone sideways. Money was disappearing. The pressure was crushing. They weren’t trying to get rich. They were trying to survive. Trying to keep people employed. Trying to keep the lights on. Trying to keep their house.

Eventually they asked for help from the church. The answer was no.

That wasn’t the whole story, but it was one of the moments that lodged itself somewhere in the back of my mind. At the time I filed it away because that’s what I did with things that didn’t fit. I filed them away.

Then came Father’s Day 2023. It was the last Sunday Alex and I sat in that room together. The next day I texted her. Not a month later. Not after I figured things out. Not after I sorted through my feelings.

The next day. Part of the text said:

“You know when you go through something and the people close to you don’t really see it? They think of you and pray for you in ways that are not at all the direction you need.”

The text went on for several paragraphs and included a curtain, a train, a ship, and a stage production because apparently I process grief by collecting metaphors.

I wrote:

“Being out of the show… being released from the train… jumping ship… or whatever you call it… is the way you are actually finding what okay feels like for the first time in a really long time.”

Then I asked if she could relate.

A week later I sent another text.

“Do you ever just feel like a fool for believing for so long?”

I told her I felt tricked.

Forgotten.

Invisible.

I told her I didn’t know how a place could be structured in a way where people left hurting and nobody seemed to ask questions. I told her I thought I needed a therapist. She didn’t defend anybody. She didn’t explain anything away. She didn’t tell me to stop being offended. She didn’t tell me to focus on the positive.

She said:

“Oh Sandie, my heart breaks for you because I know exactly how you feel and where you are at. I’m here. I will listen.”

Then she suggested coffee.

A few days later I sent another message. The one that finally cracked everything open.

I told her that for years I’d looked at people who left as though they had simply gotten better. Like the place was a hospital and they no longer needed treatment. I thought the people who stayed were the helpers. The strong ones. The ones holding things together.

Then I wrote something that still stops me when I read it.

“I don’t think people left because they found healing there. I think they left because they discovered they didn’t need the place to find healing.”

That was the moment. The friend I spent years praying would find her way back wasn’t lost. She had simply gotten there first. That’s why she became Amethyst.

One thing I learned while writing this series is that Amethyst is both a crystal and a stone. In the ground it’s a crystal. Raw. Growing exactly as it was created. Once it’s cut, shaped, polished, and placed into jewelry, people start calling it a gemstone. Same material. Different season.

I kept coming back to that while writing about this friendship.

Most of my memories of her aren’t polished ones. They’re the crystal version. Kitchen knives in Taco Bell drive-thrus. Wine on the couch. Camping trips. Nursing boobs. Bra cup science experiments. The raw, unfiltered stuff that makes up an actual life. The beautiful part is that after all these years, none of that needed polishing to become valuable.

Its name comes from a Greek word meaning clear-headed. Not intoxicated. Able to see what is actually there. Every gemstone seems determined to sound magical and mysterious. Amethyst basically says, “Drink some water and think this through.”

Not because she had all the answers. Not because she rescued me. Because she never needed me to arrive at the same conclusion she had. She just kept pulling up a chair and making room for me until I got there on my own.

Would this beautiful post be complete without a song? This one is Sweet Nothing by Taylor Swift. Not because every lyric fits. The song belongs to Taylor. The feeling belongs here. There are people who enter your life wanting something from you. Your attention. Your effort. Your energy. Then there are the rare people who can sit beside you in the middle of chaos and ask for absolutely nothing.

Years have passed. The kids grew up (some are still on the way to grown). Life changed. The friendship stayed. At some point she stopped feeling like a friend and started feeling like a sister.

Some relationships don’t need constant maintenance. They just need two people who know the door is still unlocked. One of them just has to be willing to walk through it without knocking.