"What do you think of the name, uh, Lyric?"

I frowned, "Aneeric?" That's how the spelling looked in my head.

"No," the high-school bank teller leaned closer with her hand folded under her chin, "Lyric."

I stared.

"No? Okay, you don't like it," she went back to processing my info.

"No...no, it's just that I can't see that as being a first name," I said...while thinking It doesn't even sound pretty. I stared at her, because I was afraid to ask her why she was interested in the name.

This whole conversation started with her question, "How do you pronounce your first name?". Usually, when people ask, it's because they see it as a puzzle and intuit that they can't say what they see. That's true, but I get all kinds of pronunciations when people "try it out", and I'd rather answer a question rather than inject a correction.

"Yeah...Lyric, that's interesting," I continue, because I wanna know!

"My friend asked me what I thought about that name the other day, because she wants to use it. I want to know what people think. I like it. I think it's pretty. I think I might steal it."

I stare at her mid-section. Is she in dire need of a name now?

"Huh...now I'm wondering where it comes from. Is it Latin or French..." I trail off, because I'm confused and in my head I'm screaming For why are you conducting this survey?

There is nothing wrong with picking baby names when you're 15. My friends and I did it...I'm pretty sure. This teen could have possibly been the really outgoing extroverted type teen who thought it was perfectly fine testing out baby names for her future(?) child on adult strangers. But, it felt a little awkward, even more so when I realized that she saw my name written and considered taking that too. I wanted to snatch it out of her mind. It's weird being possessive over an intangible yet public thing, like your name. Let's just say that in a decade or so, it'll be weird running into a little one named Hernease Lyric Fantasia Birmingham...or something close to that.