Barnyard
by anna
At a party, some friends taught me this parlour game where basically one person thinks of a word, and everyone else tries to guess it. There’s a few more details than that, but that’s the essence of it. The word I picked was “barnyard.” A few nights later, a couple of us were at a different party, and we taught everyone else the game. When it was my friend Sean’s turn to pick a word, he picked “barnyard.” He hadn’t been there the first time.
The weird thing is, no one seems to think this is as weird as I do. Sean and I keep making the same joke: I mean, how many words are there? At least twenty.
Do you think this means we’re meant to be together? Sean asked me. He’s joking about the part about us being together, but maybe not about the part of me thinking it. But if we’re psychically connected, that seems like a really bad idea.
My friend once went on a date with a woman who claimed to be psychic. Only one date, because as he saw it, either she’s not psychic, therefore she’s either a liar or very deluded, or she is actually psychic, in which case the relationship wouldn’t last long at all once she started getting all up in his thoughts.
Come on, I said, what do you really think about that’s so bad? In any case, if you date someone long enough, you will start to think you know what they’re thinking, even if you’re wrong. It won’t matter how wrong you are. It’s all for the worst. We make our own psychic connections.
I think that maybe another way of saying this is “barnyard.”