After a very dramatic season finale (RIP, Ashtray) Euphoria has come to a close — and along with it, a potential clue about Rue's future.

While the show's narrator survived the season, many fans worried that her omnipresent voiceover suggested that she may not live to see the end of the show. There were plenty of clues to suggest that Rue was speaking from beyond the grave, including her imagining herself as the (dead) romantic heroes from pop culture and the fact that, well, her addiction to drugs could lead her down a road to her own death. Yet in the finale, Rue's voiceover suggests she lives — which means, the existence for it might imply something else.

Here's what Rue says at the end of the Season 2 finale:

"Jules was my first love. I like to remember it that way. I don't know if it's actually true, though. I think I was high for too much of it. I know it wasn't easy for her. I hope she forgives me. I stayed clean for the rest of the school year. I wish I could say that was a decision I made. In some ways, it was just easier. I don't know if this feeling will last forever. But I am trying."

The tense suggests that Rue is looking back on her life from some point in the future — a future where she is "trying" to not use drugs. It implies that Rue is still very much alive — which means the question of, "What is this voiceover for?" still remains.

One theory goes back to a conversation that Rue and Lexi have after Rue sees her play. Rue tells Lexi that she's so impressed with the play, in part because unlike Lexi, Rue hasn't found a way to speak about the trauma she has experienced and create something meaningful out of it — but she wants to. This scene is also connected back to Rue's letter that she reads to her dad at his funeral, a moment that is replayed multiple times throughout not just the finale, but the season as a whole.

What if the reason for all of this — the voiceover, what Rue says to Lexi, and the focus on Rue's letter to her dad — is because, at some point in the future, Rue has figured out how to speak about her past, and is writing a book about it? It would make sense why Rue often speaks about things by saying "I didn't know it at the time," because, perhaps in the future, she goes back to speak to the people she went to high school with in order to gather context for her book. In that way, Rue's book is essentially the equivalent of Lexi's play, with Lexi's play being the initial inspiration for Rue to find a way to tell her story. That may be the real reason Season 2 focused on this particular meta narrative — it's literally a commentary on the entire show.

There's another interesting layer to this, too. Sam Levinson, the creator, writer, and director of Euphoria, also battled drug addiction, and even spoke about in a way that echoes Rue's own thoughts throughout the show. At the show's premiere in 2019, he told the crowd, per Variety, "I spent the majority of my teenage years in hospitals, rehabs and halfway houses. Sometime around the age of 16, I resigned myself to the idea that eventually drugs would kill me and there was no reason to fight it. I would let it take me over, and I had made peace with that."

At the premiere, he said that he found the quote, "In the end we are nothing more than an amalgamation of our actions and that’s ultimately what defines us," which ultimately helped him turn his life around. This quote echoes the one from her sponsor Ali that Rue says inspired her to be better in the finale: "The thought of maybe being a good person, is what keeps me trying to be a good person."

If this theory about Rue's voiceover is true, then Euphoria works on multiple levels: It's a story that Rue tells herself, but it's also a story that Levinson tells through Rue, about himself.

Whatever the meaning behind Rue's voiceover: It seems that our girl is at least safe, for now.