That Meme You Keep Sending Is a Test

There was a night on a porch, years back, when I said something I did not fully mean to say, and I said it sideways. I made a joke about wanting to suffer like Christ, only without the crucifixion part, and I laughed to soften the edge of it. The laugh was a small trapdoor. If she took it wrong, I could fall through and pretend I had only been clowning. But I was watching her the whole time. I was watching Leigh the way you watch a scale settle, waiting to see which way the needle tips. She flicked her ash into the dark and did not laugh at the wrong place, and she did not go back inside to smoke away my words with her friend. She stayed on the boards beside me. Her cigarette glowed and dimmed. The night held the smell of it and the cold coming up off the yard. That is what the meme is, the one where the girl screams from behind the glass of a car window, mouth stretched wide, sound sealed inside. It looks like noise thrown at no one. It is not. It is aimed. You send it to the group and you laugh and you type nothing after it, but you are watching to see who screams back. I understand that now in a way I could not name then, standing on that porch with a woman I had already decided to test. The performance is loud precisely so it can pretend not to be personal. That is the whole trick of it, and I was fluent in the trick. I handed Leigh a private reflection dressed as a passing line, so that if she flinched I could say I was only kidding. Plausible deniability is the coward’s cloak, and I wore it well, and I told myself it was charm. The searcher typing that phrase into a box at two in the morning is doing what I did on that porch. She is not asking about a picture. She is asking whether her own scream, sent out disguised as a joke, will be received by someone as a scream. I did not know, later, driving over to Jenny’s house with a comedy CD filling the truck cab with old high-school noise, that I was running the same maneuver Wade was running, that Jenny was running, that Leigh herself was running behind that studied stillness of hers. We were all broadcasting. We were all screaming behind glass. The comedy was cover. The real question sat under all of it, unspoken, patient, waiting for one honest answer. Would anyone hear the sound and not turn away? I built my whole approach to her around that one buried question and never once said it out loud.

The reason we bury the scream inside a laugh is simple, and it is not simple at all. If I say plainly, I am in pain and I need you to see it, and you do not see it, then I am standing there stripped and destroyed with no place to put my face. But if I say it as a joke, and you miss it, I lose nothing. I fold the sentence back up and walk away whole. I gave Leigh that line about wanting to suffer because I wanted her to catch the truth living under it, and yet I built the escape hatch right into the words themselves. This is the tension I could not feel then and cannot stop feeling now, all these years later. Vulnerability came to me only in costume. I could only be honest if the honesty could be denied the second it landed wrong. What kind of man is that? I put the question to myself and I refuse to soften the answer. I was a man who wanted desperately to be known and could not bear the actual cost of being known, so I sent my truth out screaming behind glass and stood back to see who could read lips. Leigh read them. Her eyes, which had been passive, took on weight, a real density I felt across the small distance between us. She nodded slowly, the way you nod when you are trying a thought on the way you try on a coat before you decide whether to keep it. And that terrified me, though I hurried to call it excitement. Because if she truly heard, then the game was finished and the real thing began, and the real thing was exactly what I both wanted and dreaded in the same breath. The meme spreads across a whole generation because everyone knows this maneuver in the body. You post the scream. You add the caption that says lol me. You wait. The waiting is the entire event, the held breath under the joke. It is a small, constant test running beneath every conversation for people who feel they are forever performing, forever checking the room. Will she recognize what I am really saying beneath what I am obviously saying? I ran that test on Leigh and I told myself it was friendship forming, and it was, and it was also something colder underneath. I was measuring her. I was checking whether she had substance, whether there was steel under the poise, whether she was more than a cipher for the fantasies of the boys around her. Even my curiosity about her soul was a form of appetite, and I dressed the appetite as interest so I would not have to see it. I wanted to know her, yes, truly. But I also wanted a witness who could pass the test I was quietly administering while I smiled. The scream behind glass is always aimed. Mine always was, and I aimed it at a girl who did not know she had walked onto a range.

Here is the turn, the thing that cracked the game open on that porch and that I have never fully walked back from. She saw me, and she did not flee. That is the whole plot of every scream ever sent into the dark. Not that someone hears the noise. Anyone can hear noise. The test is whether, having heard it, having glimpsed the wretched trapped thing screaming behind the glass, they stay in the car with you. Leigh stayed. She did not take my strange line about the cross as the raving of a fanatic and retreat inside to the safety of the smoke and her friend. She held it in her hands. She examined it with a discernment I had not expected and did not deserve. She let it be real in the air between us instead of laughing it off. And in that moment I made a mistake at once fatal and beautiful: I decided she had passed. I decided she was more than her beauty, that beneath the studied stillness there was tension and resistance and maybe even steel, and having decided it, I resolved to go after her. I would not wait for her to come to me. I would pursue. Reading it now, older, I see the whole trap I laid for the two of us. The very moment she passed my test, I stopped seeing her as she was and started using her as the answer to a question I could not answer alone in the dark. Was Leigh ever a real person to me on that porch, or was she the receiver I needed, the one who might finally confirm the version of myself I could not confirm on my own? I thought I was lonely for a woman. I was lonely for something far older and deeper than that, a place where I could speak one plain word without strategy, without the cloak, without the escape hatch sewn into every sentence I released. I wanted to be heard by God and I settled for being heard by a girl on a porch, and I mistook her steady attention for the very thing my whole soul was screaming after.

We broadcast our wound to the whole room so that one person, and only one, might prove she can hear it.

That is what the meme is doing, and it is precisely what I was doing on those cold boards. The scream is made public so it can pretend to be casual, but it is a prayer with the address torn off the envelope. I sent mine to Leigh because I could not bear to send it where it truly belonged. And she caught it, poor girl, and became for a while a stand-in for the One before whom no performance is required at all, because the seeing there is total and merciful and never once flinches.

So we drove to Jenny’s house, Wade and I, the comedy CD blaring its juvenile high-school energy off the dashboard, and I sat in the passenger seat mapping the social terrain like a small-time general planning a campaign, and I never once asked myself the question that actually mattered. What was I carrying into that house? I told myself friendship was forming, and it was, in its thin way. But sex was the subtext and I knew that plainly, and beneath the subtext ran the real hunger, the one I would not name for years to come. Leigh had passed my test, and now some part of me had already decided to collect on it. That is the ugly accounting I am forced to make now, and I will not round the numbers down. When someone finally hears the scream you sent behind glass, you owe them the truth that it was a scream, that it was aimed, that you were never joking. I owed Leigh that plain word and I did not pay it. Instead I let her go on believing she had simply stumbled into a good conversation with an interesting man, when what she had really done was wander into the close range of a very lonely one who had quietly appointed her to repair something broken in him. The fallout of that appointment spread far wider than the porch, wider than Jenny’s house, wider than that night. Because a person who is used as a confirmation cannot help but disappoint in the end. No woman on earth can carry the whole weight of a homesickness that is finally for God. I loaded that impossible weight onto Leigh’s slow nod, her steady eyes, her ash falling into the dark yard, and it was far too much for any human shoulders, and it was never hers to hold in the first place. The meme knows this too, though the one laughing at it does not. You send the scream. Someone hears it. You feel briefly, gloriously seen. And then the ordinary silence pours back in and the scream needs sending again, and again, and again, because the receiver you chose was never large enough to fill the sealed space. I laughed with Wade in that truck cab. The old comedy filled the small warm box of it. And underneath the laughing I was still screaming, still behind the glass, still aiming my trapped sound at anyone who would prove I was real by refusing to look away. I did not understand yet that the turning-away I feared most had already happened, long before, inside me, and that I was the one who had turned, away from the only One who was never going to look away in the first place. I confused my flight for His absence.

What I see now, older, having done and left undone the things I have, is that the scream behind glass is neither a joke nor a failure. It is the most honest thing a divided man can manage. When you cannot say the naked word out loud, you send the costumed one instead, and God, in His mercy, reads lips through the fogged window. That is the thing I could not see on the porch, or in the truck, or in any of the rooms I entered with my mind already made up before I crossed the threshold. I thought the test that night was whether Leigh could hear me. The real test, the one I was quietly failing without knowing it, was whether I could let myself be heard where it actually counted, in the dark, by the One who needs no cloak because He already knows exactly what lies under it. There are holy ones who at the very end walked into a darkness of unbelief so total it must have felt like screaming inside a sealed car with the doors welded shut. And the teaching I hold onto with both hands is that Christ goes precisely there, into the welded places, to find the ones who have wandered furthest from the light. He does not roll the window down and lift the terror out of your chest. He climbs in beside you. He sits down inside the trapped noise. He reads the lips of the scream and He stays there. That is not a rescue, not the kind I kept demanding. It is company, which turns out to be the harder and the truer grace, the one I could not recognize because it did not remove my suffering fast enough for my liking. If you are the one typing that meme’s name into the dark tonight, hear this plainly and take from it whatever you can hold. Your scream is aimed, and it is aimed far higher than you think it is. You are not really asking whether the group chat sees you at all. You are asking whether anyone, anywhere, will look straight at the ugly trapped sound of you and not flee the moment they see it. I ran that whole aching question through the wrong door for years, and Confessions to the Empty Chair is the long accounting of what my aim cost the people I fired it at, and what it finally took to aim it right. Leigh stayed one night on a porch, and she could not have stayed forever, and it was cruel of me to want her to. Only One can stay forever. He was already in the car with me, reading my lips through the glass, while I was still too busy performing to turn my head and find Him sitting there.