Mint Julips, and Other Broken Dreams(Susan Joyner-Stumpf) Mint Julips, and Other Broken Dreams

You could not save me. The whiplash of a dream made me stagger back into reality. You tried to hold me in a weak embrace. If only you knew you were a part of that infamous nightmare, riding my frigid bones with colder, yet, steel fingers of grasping death. And you didn’t even know you tried to kill me.

I guess it was your initial possessiveness that swallowed me and I had to crawl away, to gather remnants of what remained of my sanity. All along the choppy road of our twisted, winding love, you read too much into me, defined your narcissistic world with my every move, and the responsibility I felt to be that “everything or bust” to you was actually, very overwhelming. Yet when I would Soul-search myself inside of you, seeking that balance in the waves, that “oneness” fusion that lovers endeavor to achieve, instead I would discover bleak nothingness; an empty shell; no answers; and more endless, unanswered questions. It was all you ~ what you wanted, how you had to have it and in what exact quantity, what you couldn’t live without. I became third place in the line of gratuity, the receiving end of whips upon a dead race horse who couldn’t win because her Jockey rode her into the bloody, frothing ground. And he didn’t see it coming until all movement ceased ~ and he started beating the stillness of air, not even realizing the Thoroughbred between his thighs was long-since dead.

It was over Mint Julips at the Destrehan Plantation alongside the lazy, meandering Mississippi River, that finally I realized we were as colorless as the Spanish Moss dripping from the row of giant oaks; and as lethal as the slimy things that slivered in the covet of darkness out of cricket-symphony marshes. Funny that I felt that way, because it was at a friend’s wedding, the purpose of our being there: to help celebrate a new beginning, but for us, ironically, its brutal end. Just like when you go to the funeral of your grandfather and on the same day attend the Ceremony of the birth of a child; life and death; death and life. The cycle goes on, with or without us. Winding through us like a restless, raging river. And just as unforgiving.

It was a balmy day and the waiter dressed in a White Tux was serving all the invited guests at pristine wicker tables across a sea of green, under a canopy of oaks, with those strong Mint Julips. We sat at a table with another couple; strangers who did most of the talking to us as you and I sipped our utter boredom of them down in colored plastic straws, slurping loudly at the end, until another was planted under our empty lips. I guess we kept thinking (hoping against all hope) that they would find our rudeness unbearable and seek another couple. But they didn’t seem to mind the little to no eye-to-eye contact or retorts to their deluge of rhetorical questions.

After about five or six of those Mint Julips, the couple sounded less and less mundane and we even began to share tidbits of our lives with them, explaining how we knew the bride and groom. Of course, we didn’t expose too much about each other and though I had volumes I could have spilled about you, I just didn’t bother. Who’d want to hear it, I thought? And I suspect your memory would fail (regardless of the entourage of liquor) to reveal much on the subject of me since you never dug down deep enough to find out ~ only long enough to feel thick wads of bundled hundred dollar bills you always carried loose in your back hip pockets. Guess that made you feel important – gangsta-like, I would imagine. A macho-thing. I wouldn’t know, since I never saw any of it ever land in my meager wallet nor benefited from it via in the form of a thoughtful gift from you, something nice like that, you know, just for a change of pace.

After a while, I could tell the couple were starting to look real good to us. I was engaged in conversation with the handsome gentleman, and you were wrapped in the delicious wiles of his fiery-headed young maiden. Didn’t it seem strange – the turn of events of the conversation, with her just focused on you, and me just talking to him? It was subjects we could have shared ~ all of us ~ but instead we smothered and were smothered by our chosen partner, with the others seemingly on purpose and only God knows why – excluded. And I don’t know why, but it wasn’t enough to make me feel important or special, even. And I sure wasn’t jealous of you and for the first time, I didn’t see you raise that ugly green monster of a mug of yours, so I figured we were cool with all this. As cool as the endless stream of Mint Julips that found their way to us on that hot, steamy, balmy afternoon on a Louisiana Plantation.

Finally, the wedding. I mean, that’s what we came here for, right? And we were forced to be quiet and listen to their vows that they didn’t write, and I wondered if they really meant them because they sounded like actors reading from a script. I kept wanting to yell out loud to them ~ this is your life, man! It’s all you’ve got. Clutch it hard, dig in, give it all your gusto! But the two of them appeared more like beautiful Barbie and Ken Mannequins instead of two bodies encased in porcelain flesh. Those same two bodies who were going to make love tonight in some exotic hotel room across virgin sheets (yeah right), so I hope they show a little more passion where it counts. And when.

Then it was buffet time and I wasn’t hungry. I watched everyone else get up and load their plates down dripping with crab cakes and cold asparagus spears and that traditional Swedish Meatball dish that every catered wedding thinks that people like. The truth is, we’re all so drunk that I don’t think we would have noticed had they served finger sandwiches with bologna or Spam instead of salmon pate’. Who cares, anyway, what we stuff our face with? We all come to a buffet and we act like it’s going to be the last time on Earth that we’re ever going to be able to suck down a decent meal. So what do we do? We take our fill, and then some, wasting the majority of it because of course, our eyes were larger than our thin tummies. How totally disgusting does it look to see half-eaten and extremely pricey Broulette Beef Tips marinated in Chelsea wine sauce spread like a picnic across the top of a foul-smelling dumpster? We’re here for the bride and groom, to send them off on their merry way, hopefully, to some measure of marital bliss. But then, where is that? I must have missed the Turn Off Sign somewhere along the way, having detoured and found towering cities of neon-lighted disillusion and smaller towns teeming with love ~ or rather, its masked imposter. Admittedly, it even fooled me into believing in its disguised authenticity. But the truth is ~ it’s all a cleverly master-minded charade, a grand, yet intangible, mirage.

Then I have to explain myself, why I’m not a clone, gorging myself like everyone else. Because I’m not hungry, I want to tell them. Perhaps because I don’t want to. None of your business. What’s it to you and you don’t seriously care. You’re on a need-to-know-basis or should be. I don’t eat food when I’m miserable like most people. Just the opposite. I loose my appetite ~ that zest for life ~ when depression over-shadows like an eclipse and sneers wickedly: lights out, baby. Anyway, so they all sit there and I’m forced to watch Marinara sauce trickle down the creases of their mouths. I feel nauseated. In fact, I have to often look away or I will do just that. They’re all beginning to make me feel queasy and I feel the urgent need to get up, walk around. I was getting ready to say go get some fresh air but then, since I’m already outside, that wouldn’t make a heck of a lot of sense now, would it? Anyway, I politely excuse myself and take a stroll, alone.

I find myself behind the mansion. It is quiet. I hear the wind through the ancient trees, and for the first time all day, I felt content, like, this is where I belong, right here, right now, in a crowd of nature. What’s against the grain is me being in a throng of humans stuffing faces or getting married yet still flirting with potentials out there. I decide I’m going to have to leave Mark but I will tell him some other time, not now. Not this moment in a place where love, or its beautiful pretense, floats heavenly upon a tentative cloud. Let me allow my friend to get married in peace, or pieces of whatever she can find and assemble to her yearning Soul. They all say find someone, anyone, it’s better than being alone. I beg to differ. I would rather spend two hours with Mr. Right than ten years with a Mr. Wrong. And the rest of the time, I will not be lonely, but I will thank God that I was blessed with those two hours to memorize how it should be ~ forever. I hope she doesn’t end up like me, I shudder, meshed in a relationship after ten years and you wake up one morning in your bed, in your handsome home in the heart of the French Quarter, and you realize ~ hell ~ it’s not the right one. That you made a terrible mistake and suddenly fell out of love and now what? It’s not like being on a game show and you choose the wrong prize behind Door Number Three where you can just walk away and say, oh well, maybe next time I’ll take my chances instead and select Door Number One.

Walking back, the drift of the band’s karaoke settled pleasantly in my ears and splintered sunlight wept intermittently through draping leaves of emerald green. Distant laughter tickled and electrified my skin like faint, teasing feathers. Mark didn’t appear to notice my approach, but the gentleman and his lady did. She acknowledged with almost impatient glints in dark, darting eyes. But soon enough, she swiftly dismissed my humdrum existence, returning her more than ample cleavage beneath my husband’s unwavering, drooling attentiveness. Her husband, Jason, grabbed a Mint Julip off the rushing tray of a Waiter and slowly walked towards me with it, outreached, obviously for me.

“We wondered where you were,” he offered shyly, handing me the drink.

“I really didn’t think I’d be missed,” I said, matter-of-factly.

I took a sip. A breeze blew my hair into my mouth, and without thinking, I guess because he was used to doing it for his wife, Carla, Jason carefully removed the mischievous strands back to their rightful place. He felt embarrassed and turned as red as the roses pinned to the bride ladies’ hair. We both said nothing about it after that.

I caught him looking at me, the way a man looks at a woman, wishing it wasn’t his sister, or his sister’s best friend, or his own best friend. I looked back at him the way a woman looks at a man, wondering who he is, where he’s been, how does he like his coffee in bed?

And just like at a wedding, when you see the union of two people, and the coincided breakage going on within your own tattered relationship; or when you’re at a funeral and you hear a bellowing infant in someone’s arms, then simultaneously stare sadly upon the lifeless, waxed-looking corpse, swathed in eerie silence. Here too, I guess, was a blind moment defined in a Mint Julip, which, up until now ~ I thought all along epitomized the essence of and/or encapsulated broken dreams. But then, someone comes along, emerging like a phantom from the fog of thin, crisp air, offering you a diverse concoction of the identical Mint Julip. And all the sudden you realize ~ it was right under your nose the entire time ~ life and death; death and life. The cycle that goes on with us or without us. Icing though intricate channels of our mortal veins.

But sometimes if you pause, ever briefly, just long enough to listen real hard between sporadic frequencies of white noise, you might hear, under an old oak tree by the Mississippi River, in front of the exquisite grandeur of an old Plantation, you might just hear egg shells cracking. And no, it’s not what you thought – not what you’re used to. It’s not your heart re-shattering.

It’s the symbolic birth of a new dream.

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