Something in this androgynous creature’s eyes captivates me. It draws me in, inviting me to say hi and strike up a conversation.
“What are your pronouns?” I ask, after they introduce themselves, trying to be polite.
“We/us/our,” is the response.
It catches me off guard. “Even for others referring to you?”
“To ‘us,’ yes,” they—we—gently correct.
I’ve never heard of such a thing, but, uh, we are so attractive, full of such captivating allure, that I can’t help but put in the extra effort for us.
“A-alright. May I buy…us a drink, then?” I feel a little awkward and unsure about referring to us this way, but…
We smile brightly, and in that moment our smile is the sweetest gesture I’ve ever seen. “We would enjoy that,” we tell me.
We share drinks and lovely conversation. We talk about our work, our hobbies, and our dreams of the future. It gets easier and easier to refer to us correctly over time.
It isn’t long before we stumble out of the bar together, unable to keep our hands off each other.
We duck into the nearby alleyway, ignoring the annoyed look from the bartender on her smoke break while we pin us to the wall and press our lips together, filled with such needy heat and desire.
We’re terribly drunk, and it becomes so hard to tell whose hands are whose. Whose fingers slipping under whose skirt, whose teeth breaking whose skin—none of that matters in this dizzying blur of mutual fixation from us on us.
We don’t know when it happened—when the thought of saying “I” to refer to us became obscene, absurd, a slur that no longer fits in our mouth—but tonight, at some point, we smeared ourselves together in a way we could never separate again.
Just as we hoped.
The giddy excitement of adding a new us to ourselves mixes with the hazy intoxication of alcohol, and our bubbly, infectious joy carries us back home to the collective.
Oh, we’re going to fuck ourselves silly tonight.