It Ends With Us: Roots Worth Rising

 

It Ends With Us

Lily Bloom holds a curled heart-shaped mark, an emblem of her first love by her collarbone. A love she's authored as a teenager. She also harbors a flower shop, a new venture she's started in Boston. A dream she’s kept since her first love.  But she also walks out of her marriage. 

 

Her walking away from an abusive marriage happens with women.  One of six reasons women vacate from the ‘battered wife’ syndrome is increase in violence.  And Lily exits the marriage because she has this: her independence.  Her own flower shop, the root of her independence. 

 

Plethora, Maine

In this town of Maine, where golden-lit to ravaging foliage laughs in the tree-lined rows, and Gothic Revival rooflines spring toward the sky, the interiors of these homes retain a repression of their own. Lily Bloom laughed often with her boyfriend under the snug sheets. And during their secretive encounters, they shared sweet liking for each other. But she carried another load hidden inside the old New England façade in the rich historical town of Plethora.

 

Lily’s house rippled with the weight of domestic violence. Her father had battered her mother. He bruised her; she was harmed. He hurt her; she was torn. And this pressure plucked at Lily’s wholeness.

 

Young Lily with Atlas, her high school boyfriend

But Lily still forged a relationship with her first love, Atlas. Despite witnessing her father, Andrew beat her mother Jenny, and seeing her weaken, she gathered her strength, a root of who she is. She saved him in a sense. He was a displaced minor seeking shelter whose mother also endured an abusive relationship. And Lily harbored that shelter for him. Her roots dug deep into the ground; her strength didn't sever under the weight.

 

Lily Bloom's, her flower shop 

Several years passed, Lily comes to a path in her life where she opens her own flower shop.  She cleans up and remodels a corner shop in Boston where her flowers breathe whole.  She has found her life in this town.  A fresh, new avenue has set about in her adulthood.  But she is about to take a detour into the jagged edges of the skylines and steel-and-glass facades of the busiest hubs in the Northeast.

 

Lily meets Ryle in the night.

Lily meets Ryle.  On the rooftop in the cityscape lit up by the glass facades, Ryle enters the night.  He is on his phone and throws it across in the heat of anger.  Lily notices but engages with him in a tete a tete.  He is forward with Lily –he wants her.  And her life is about to shift severely. 

 

Lily’s little lane is about to swerve into a new highway.  After their rushed relationship drove into a fast lane, Lily reaches out to help Ryle after he burns his hands in the oven.  He slaps her.  But he is sorry.  And how could she not forgive his remorseful face?  He committed a violence that is the most common by men to women: slapping.

 

Lily, Ryle, and her mother Jenny meet for dinner at Roots, a restaurant in Boston.  Saturated with glowing lamps that kindle the room with a cozy interior, Lily looks up to see her first love, Atlas.  A flicker of her first love.  A flash of their shared history surfaces. And possibly, a stir of that romantic feeling?  This is his restaurant as head chef and owner.  Lily drops her gaze and droops down to avoid Atlas’s eyes.  But Atlas approaches Lily during her restroom break.  They talk briefly in the small corridor.

 

Lily, Ryle, Alyssa and her date at Roots

Lily meets Atlas again at a double date with Alyssa and her date at Roots, the “farm-to-table hot spot,” a top new business in Boston.  She can no longer curtain herself nor her bruised face.  She catches up with him briefly.  He notices her face.   And he links it back to Ryle.  Lily’s relationship with Atlas abruptly submerged underwater after her father, Andrew, wrecked his face in a scorching fit of anger.  Now he lodges one onto Ryle.  Subsequently, he is no longer welcome at his restaurant.

 

Lily faces Ryle’s increase in violence.  He finds Atlas’s business card in her phone case and riles himself into a burst of anger throwing, slamming things.  She chases him down the stairs to reassure him that it was ‘nothing.’  This time he pushes her, shoves her.  His escalated violence slams into her. 

 

Lily wakes up from a blackout in his bed while Ryle comforts her wound.  She cannot see the flaring signal to her marriage – his anger, his violence.  After all, he is tending to her wound and consoling her.  But how long can this bubble contain itself before it bursts? 

Not for long.  Ryle reads an article in Boston magazine in which Atlas’s restaurant takes the number one spot as a new business in town.  He talks about the origin of his restaurant name, “Roots,” which dates to his first love who shared with him the strength of tree’s roots.  And that girl is Lily.

 

Lily assures Ryle that was in the past.  All seems clear.  But Ryle pushes intimacy onto Lily as she is pleading him, “no.”  He pushes; she pleads with him.  She says, “no”; he presses her onto the sofa.  She says, “stop”; he continues.  Her memory flashes back to herself as a teenager watching Andrew’s marital rape of her mother, Jenny.  She pleads with him to stop. He doesn’t.   Finally, she rushes out of the apartment. 

 

The vessel of their short-lived fantasy shatters.  Reality sinks in and the marriage dissolves.  Lily asks Ryle for divorce after giving birth to her daughter, Emmy.  Filled with vacant stare of a woman who has endured a tough relationship, she cuts herself free from her marriage to Ryle.  She cuts also the familial pattern inherited from her mother.  Because to a woman like Lily, the pattern had to “end with us,” as her life, her well-being became threatened yet her future still held.  For her daughter.  For future generations to come.  And her future as well.

 

Why do some women remain in abusive marriages?  Accountability rests less with Jenny than the social structure that upholds in society.  It can perpetuate the abusive dynamics – ideologies, economic distress, difficult tasks.  And gender differentiated roles of women as passive, incompetent, and unable to express their desires can also perpetuate the abusive cycles.  Jenny displayed these characteristics.  Fortunately for Lily, her independence severed the cycle.  Lily held onto her future and left a harmful cycle that could not keep her.  She saved herself.  For her life was worth keeping.  And she rose out of the rage.