There’s a scene in one of the bonus episodes of Euphoria, the one where it’s just the protagonist Rue and her NA sponsor Ali getting pancakes at a diner on Christmas Eve, where Ali steps outside to call his daughter. We know from previous episodes that Ali is a recovered crackhead with seven years of sobriety (twelve before that) and that at some point he lost his daughters. We’ve just learned, from his conversation with Rue in the diner, that he’d been physically violent with their mother, that there is shame wrapped up in this abuse, that Ali’s own father had beat his mother and that Ali, as a kid, had wanted to kill him for it. We can assume that his daughters must be grown now — Ali is in his fifties.
He steps outside and lights a cigarette and calls. We only hear his side of the conversation, a little hesitant but ultimately resolute — he just wanted to wish her a merry Christmas. At one point, he asks his daughter to tell her sister that he loves her. We don’t hear her reply, but we see Ali’s body language change: his fidgeting slows, he looks forward and then down. “No, I’m not trying to talk to her through you,” he says. The conversation goes on; we hear him talking to someone, presumably his grandson, that he calls “little man.” Throughout, Ali holds himself at a distance that we might read as being a result of his addiction and subsequent estrangement but which, I think, is in fact a product of something else: Ali sees and understands other people, including his daughters, as entirely separate from — and just as real as — himself.
There is a memory I have in which I’m maybe fifteen, in my bedroom about to go to sleep when my mom walks in and starts yelling at me, upset about something. I don’t remember what the accusation was, but I remember it wasn’t about anything specific I had done wrong. It was more generalized: I hadn’t done anything wrong; I simply was wrong. My entire being was wrong. I sat mute on the edge of the bed, receiving the vague accusations and knowing there was nothing I could say or do that would change what was happening. My mom’s anger in that moment must have been so unbearable that it sent her searching for a release valve, a probable external cause, a scapegoat, an object of blame. I knew there was nothing I had done to cause it, and that as a result, there was also nothing I could do to relieve it. There was no fault and no forgiveness.
I have another memory, earlier, of my middle-school friend Ann being upset with me because I’d called her stupid. She’s sniping at me in the cafeteria line, and before I can swear to her I didn’t do it, that she must have misunderstood, that I must have meant something else, I stand back and look at her and realize she just wants me to say I’m sorry. I do. We put our plastic trays up on the counter and get served whatever slop is on offer that day.
I’ve been thinking about the distance that we put between ourselves and other people, the positive distance, I mean, the distance that helps us see others in their totality, see them as just as real as we are, ever since an excerpt from Heather Havrilesky’s book, Foreverland, caused a bunch of chatter online. I won’t get into the issues that people found with it nor the way that they defended it. Suffice it to say there was plenty from both sides, as there usually is with anything that makes people want to say things on the internet. My reading, though, boiled down to this: there was something artificial in the way that Havrilesky writes about her husband Bill, a sense that her words were both propelled and bound by a force outside of herself, outside of Bill, outside of their relationship. Her comparison of Bill to a heap of laundry, for example, struck me as a too-funny way to avoid saying something else, something more uncomfortable, something more true.
I don’t know if that is actually the case for Havrilesky, nor do I think it matters. What I’m interested in is: why do we expect familial relationships to endure treatments that we’d never expect a friendship to endure? Why do we treat family as though they deserve less respect, less kindness, less generosity, than anyone else, as though we owe them nothing, but, paradoxically, as though they owe us everything?
A few days later, my friend M texts me to ask what I think about the Havrilesky piece. We talk for a while and eventually land on the idea that long-term relationships — families, marriages — often have to endure the weight of the fantasies we deposit into them. That sometimes, if we’re not careful, it’s not just the thing itself we’re dealing with, but the hope of everything that could be and everything we wish for even if it might never be. And in that framework, other people become indeed less-than-real; they become living symbols of that hope and living representations of the disappointment when the hope is dashed.
Does it have to be that way, I wonder? Can we live these things otherwise?
I had a relationship once, long and more painful than any other I’ve had, wherein I sometimes felt like the other person — we’ll call him Max — did not see me as real. I’d tell him this, insisting that because he kept our relationship a secret, hidden from other parts of his life, other people in his life, because he expected that our relationship would have no impact on any other part of his life, that I felt like I was not real to him. Max would argue with me, try to find a loophole, a crack in my logic, some way to get me to back off from what I was saying. He’d claim that the word “real” was doing a lot of heavy lifting. He’d claim that I was saying things I knew I wasn’t. I’d back off.
My greatest fear was that to him I was indeed a fantasy. That I was not a person, but a representation of what he wanted but would never actually commit to having. I’d set the fear aside most of the time — I never wanted to act out of it — and when it would flare up I would look at it. I would describe it to myself. I would describe it to my friends. Sometimes, I’d describe it to Max. Once when I did, he responded by saying that most people, to him, weren’t real. That they became filled in with time, as they revealed more of themselves to him. I bristled. I’m bristling now, as I write this, thinking that what I want to be able to do, what I want us all to be able to do, is treat others as though they’re real — just as real as we are — without anyone having to do anything to prove it.