Maggie Supreme
26 Feb, 2026
I am writing this as a helpless message in a bottle, like Gatsby at the end of his dock, like a parrot talking itself into insanity in a mirror. I don't really know what I want, or what I'm supposed to want. But I know that I will never get it. So I write in vain. For you.
Something happened last friday. Something bad happened last friday. Something bad happened to me last friday. I did something bad last friday. Something bad happened to me last friday? Something bad happened to me. Something bad happened.
If i were to lay out the story in the clearest and simplest language that i could, according to my clearest memory and the best of my ability, I would tell you that I was sexually assaulted last friday. Very simply, according to the letter of the law, that is what happened. But i am having a very hard time wrapping my head around that. What I remember of the night is throwing up, being tucked in, a naked body, saying no, saying no again, putting a protective hand between my legs. These are, at their core, the ingredients of something that can only be described in plain language as sexual assault. But this is not all that I remember of the night, nor all that exists to surround it. I remember uttering encouragement and confessions, I remember lewd and possessive statements and actions. Is it still assault if I told him that I touched myself to the thought of him? Can he still have hurt me if I told him he was "mine"? Is it still wrong that he tried to fuck me when I told him not to if I think deep down I might have wanted it?
We had hooked up once before. He had cried a thousand tears in front of me. I had woken up sweating every night that week dreaming about him. I told him that he was one of my best friends; earlier that night as we walked through the weapons hall of the Met, picking which guns we were, i whispered to him that in the impending collapse of our friend group, I would have to stick with him because I didn't think anyone else really liked me very much. He shared profoundly hurt parts of himself with me, and I made him tea and told him I was sorry that he didn't get to be a whole person. He asked my permission to kiss me on the cheek. We tried to learn to play bridge together. We smelled expensive perfume. I bought him coffee. He made me take care of myself. We were boys together.
The night that it happened, I don't know if i slept at all. After regaining a certain level of lucidity, I was up and down frequently. I didn't totally understand what was happening or how. At some point I set an alarm to get him out at 7am. I laid next to him, turning away, curling into the wall, but then fearing I would hurt his feelings, I reached out and took his hand. When the alarm went off, he asked for 5 more minutes. I gave him 30. I felt profoundly sad dragging his persistently naked body out of my bed, in my 2020 "Vote Bernie" t shirt. As I hugged him goodbye at the top of my staircase, I told him that I wished he didn't have to go. Even as I was making him leave, kicking him out, I knew that as long as he was there I could be lost in him. And as soon as he was gone, I was dropped alone into the reality of what had happened.
After a few hours of restless sleep, I called my friend and told them, very vaguely, the story. That I had blacked out, thrown up on myself, and that he had "lingered." I said that I didn't feel violated, but that I didn't feel that it had been my fault, because it hadn't really been a choice that I made. I asked them how much of it was my moral responsibility, and they said nothing beyond getting drunk with him. My stomach twisted. I thought about the feeling of his dick rutting against me as I told him I didn't want to have sex. I went back to sleep.
It took about a day and a half for me to come to terms with the fact that what had happened was not, in fact, a terrible thing that I had done that everyone would be mad at me for. A day and a half for me to understand that this was a new and different kind of hurt. Since then, I have been slowly trying to piece together a narrative that supports itself against the weight of my feelings.
Thinking of myself as a "victim" feels wrong and painful. Painful because it flattens me, painful because it doesn't capture the complexity and weight and beauty of our friendship, painful because it cant hold the nuance of the betrayal that I feel because of that friendship. Wrong because I am afraid that this is still deep down my fault, my doing, that I am the disturbed mastermind behind some ploy to hurt my friend and myself for reasons that are unclear. I know that most sexual assault doesn't happen at the hands of a stranger. But it feels impossible and incorrect to hang everything that happened that night, everything I feel about it and about him and about us, on that one singular term. I want to believe that it is more than that. That it is infinitely more complex, that its so complex that no one but us could ever understand it, that its so complex that there is still room for redemption. I don't want this to be a bad thing that happened to me because that doesnt leave room for it to be beautiful, and I want it to still be beautiful. I want enough room in the story to continue it, to twist it into something that is ultimately, despite the pain and betrayal and tragedy, a beautiful story of love. Love makes all wrong doing redeemable, makes every sin forgivable, washes the shame from my wounds and invites me to grow. If I am a victim, then I can go nowhere. If his sin against me is beyond forgiveness, then the wound it has delt me is unhealable. Then we are both blighted for eternity. And I can't believe that that is true.
In the story that I tell myself, me being his victim doesn't fit for the same reason that I can not bring myself to be angry or to not want to talk to him or to understand that he hurt me. It contradicts the story I had already been telling myself for weeks before this happened, that I had let myself believe might be somewhat true: that he loves me. That I'm special, that I'm special to him, that he could and would never do something like this to me because deep down, in a twisted and distant and confused and platonic and maybe maternal and maybe (shamefully, hopelessly, infantile-y) romantic way, he loves me.
We spoke yestarday, and it went about as I had expected and feared. He was shocked, told me that he had no idea that I had been blacked out, that he thought that i wanted it, that i had even been assertive in demanding things from him. That he was sorry, that he was mad at me, that he wasn't, that I had been a good friend to him, that he would go whenever I asked him to. I asked him to tell me the story of what had happened that night, and the night through his eyes was everything I feared it was. Me begging him to stay, me demanding that he touch me, me all but forcing him into my bed to fuck me. He told me that he had even come in to the conversation with a spiel prepared on how he felt like I was using him for a "cheap thrill." He told me that the night we saw Marty Supreme together was one of the coolest nights of his life. The stories we had been telling ourselves were very different.
Now, I am left alone with my thoughts and my memories (and lackthereof) to try to stitch together the tales I have been told. Which feels like an impossible task, because these two narratives simply can not fit together. I want more than anything to believe him, to trust him. I don’t believe that he would deliberately lie to me; if he had been planning to accuse me of using him for his body, I don’t think that he thought that I didn’t want him. I think that he thought that I wanted him too much, that I was selfishly mistreating him because of it. That I, with my boyfriend and my messy boundaries and stable family and support system, held all the cards between us. And maybe to him that was true. I want to believe that was true.
But I can’t imagine how I could have demanded that he stay and strip when I didn’t have the strength to keep my guts down. I can’t believe that I could have been so persuasive, even manipulative, while totally unconscious. I can’t trust that I was truly in control. And there are memories of mine that contradict his story of himself as my misused boy-toy. If I had held all the cards, asked for everything, initiated everything, why did I have to tell him not to fuck me? Why did I have to tell him multiple times? Why didn’t he listen? Why did I have to tuck a protective hand between us as he persistently rubbed against me? Why when I defensively pointed out that he wasn’t even wearing a condom, trying to negotiate him away, did he tell me that he wanted to get me pregnant? If I had begged him to stay when he hadn’t wanted to, why when he said to me “If you want me to go I’ll go” did I feel confident enough to contradict him? To tell him he was lying? To challenge him to leave and find him unmoving in my bed? If I had been the one who had wanted everything that night, then why had he done anything at all?
I do not think that he is lying to me. I believe that I asked him to stay. I believe that I tried to take off his jacket. I believe that he believed that I wanted it. I believe that maybe I did. But I don’t believe that I was in control. And I don’t know if I can believe that he believed that. Which shatters me to my core. The thought that he could have seen my vulnerability, my lack of control, and persisted. That he could have heard my protests and disregarded them. I don’t know if I can believe that either.
The easiest way to avoid that is to blame myself. So that is a lot of what I have been doing. Letting myself believe his story that, in my blackout, I am every mans worst nightmare: a girl capable of feigning sobriety well enough to trick him into a sexual encounter, only for him to wake up to my claimed ignorance and accusations of predation. A predator with the power to trap an innocent man in guilt when he has done nothing wrong. The conductor of a witch hunt. A liar. Letting myself be a liar and a predator rather than a victim, as much as it hurts, shifts the power back into my hands. It allows me to imagine a world where I can apologize to him, and through my own actions, make this right. I could take all of this and hold it within me and crush it until its gone. And I could move on.
Taking the blame would also resolve my most secret guilt and shame that makes it impossible for me to accept his wrongdoing in any of this: I still want him. I had another dream of him yesterday, pressing my face into my pillow with the long beautiful fingers that i couldn’t help admiring even as I sat across from him and told him how much he had hurt me and that we couldn’t be friends anymore. I don’t know what’s wrong with me that I could still want someone who I know, in objective terms and plain english, sexually assaunted me. That I could want so badly to dive back into harms way, that I could fantasize about him truly doing whatever he wanted to me and wanting and needing it, relinquishing control to him gladly and finding nothing but pleasure. I am afraid of the monster this might make me. Maybe more than anything else.
What I really want right now is to see him tomorrow and for all of this to go away. Through my sacrafice or divine intervention or magic, I want this to be resolved and forgiven so that the next time I see him drinking a cup of tea in the marble room I can greet him the way I've always greeted him. "Hello my dear friend!" I want to let this hurt be replaced by smiles and nonsense noises and games and drinks passed back and forth. I want him to be my friend again. I know that the game we were playing was doomed to lead to our demise, together or apart. Despite my better judgement, I couldn't keep my distance from him. I let the attraction and affection and emotional intimacy between us flourish, allowing myself to feign helplessness in the current of his charms, irresponsibly pulling him closer when I saw the danger on the horizon. The writing was on the wall. Yet still, I want the game to resume. It was fun. And I wasn't done playing. If I let myself be the villain, maybe we can play again.
But I know that no matter how good I get at telling myself that story, it won't be true. The day after it happened, I found my vomit soaked dress piled in the corner of my room. I don't know how it came off me, if he took it off or I did. But I know he watched me, eyes probably glazed and lids probably heavy, puke down the front of it and straight onto my shoes. I know that he knew I wasn't sober enough to make it home on my own. And I know that he stayed in my bed despite that. That he wouldn't have stayed unless he wanted to. That he shouldn't have. That no matter how much I want to believe his story, or any other story I tell myself, it won't erase that uneasy, hurt feeling inside me. That it might never go away.