Creative Writing Workshop: The Styrofoam Confession

 

Photo Credits to Rollin' Records

The Styrofoam Confession

Inspired by “Bad Religion” by Frank Ocean

Written by Sara Baloum

 The city outside was slick with rain, glowing and pulsing, as if New York itself had a fever. It was pouring, the kind of rain that softened even concrete. There was too much traffic for clarity to heal. Ezra slipped into the back of the cab like a shadow. No umbrella, just a Styrofoam cup clutched tightly in his hand, the lip already going soggy from his grip. He didn’t look up.

“Anywhere,” he muttered. “Just drive.”

The driver nodded once, his eyes calm in the rearview. Prayer beads swung lightly from the mirror. The soft thrum of the engine filled the silence between them.

Ezra stared out the window. The city outside was a blur of red lights and silvery rain. His fingers clutched the Styrofoam cup, but the warmth had faded. The flavor, he already knew, would be bitter. He glanced down at the cup, then back up to meet the driver’s eyes in the mirror.

“I just needed to talk,” he said suddenly, his voice cracking like a door half-shut. “Or—not talk, maybe. Just be somewhere. With someone.”

The driver didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Ezra hadn’t asked a question.

Ezra looked down at the cup. Swirled it. Took a sip. Flinched at the bitterness.

“You ever…” he started, then stopped. “Have you ever cared about someone so much it felt like a sickness?”

Still no answer. But Ezra didn’t need one. That wasn’t a real question, either.

“I kept thinking it would pass,” he said, still watching the rain. “That if I just held on long enough, things would... align. Like stars.”

The driver’s eyes remained steady on the road. Ezra saw only passing shadows, neon bleeding down windows like stained glass in motion.

“I never told anyone the whole thing. Not really. I mean—my friends knew I was... seeing someone. They assumed. But I never said it. Never said who.”

His fingers tapped against the cup, restless. Ezra was spiraling, he knew that. But it was better than silence.

“Because it wasn’t just that he didn’t love me. It was that I couldn’t even say his name out loud. Couldn’t say it. Not even to myself, sometimes.”

“It felt holy,” he said. “I would’ve joined any religion if he were the god. The way he walked into a room. The way I bent my life around him was like gravity. And I—I bowed too. I prayed.”

He laughed, but the sound was brittle. “But it wasn’t holy. It was a cult. One where I was the only worshipper, the only believer. Where love was loyalty and silence was scripture.”

The driver continued moving, nodding in acknowledgment as the road hummed beneath them.

“There’s poison in this,” Ezra said, holding up the Styrofoam. “Cyanide, maybe. Or just hope.”

The driver’s voice, low and patient, cut through the quiet like the first note of a hymn. “Bobo. You need prayer.”

He blinked hard, jaw tightening. “But what if the kneeling is the problem? What if loving someone shouldn’t bring you to your knees?”

The driver’s fingers tapped the steering wheel. The prayer beads clicked against each other in almost rhythmic succession.

“My mom used to say I needed prayer. That something was broken in me. She didn’t know about... him. Not really. But I think she guessed. And the thought made her pray harder.”

He stared down at the Styrofoam cup. His thumb pressed into the rim until it bent. “But I did pray. Every day. For him to look at me. To see me. I shaped my whole life around that hope. Around him. Every text, every silence, every second I didn’t say too much. Or said nothing at all. It was a kind of worship.”

“Real love doesn’t ask you to disappear,” the driver said. His voice was low, weathered. “Or to lie. Or to kneel.” The man kept his eyes on the road.

“Feels like I’ve been kneeling for years.” Ezra swallowed.

 The driver turned onto a quieter street. The rain was easing. “Where I come from,” he said, “we kneel five times a day. But prayer isn’t begging. It’s alignment. Balance. Peace.”

Ezra looked up, startled—not because of what was said, but because of how plain it was. There was no attempt to correct, to console—just a fact.

The driver’s eyes stayed on the road. “We face a direction. We stand, we bow, we kneel. We return to ourselves.”

Ezra didn’t answer. Not right away.

“I knelt too,” he said. “But it wasn’t for peace. It was for permission.”

“I used to imagine he’d change his mind,” Ezra said. “That he’d wake up and realize I was worth loving. But now I think… I just didn’t want to admit he never saw me that way to begin with.”

A silence settled, dense and airless. Ezra stared down at the crushed Styrofoam cup in his lap. His fingers were sticky with what had spilled—lukewarm, bitter, and faintly sweet if you pretended hard enough. He looked at the cup like something once sacred that had gone rancid.

“I treated it like a sacred altar,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “Every moment of silence that stretched between us, every text I resolutely held back from sending, and every painful second I spent clinging to hope—each of these became a ritual sacrifice. I offered up pieces of my very soul, laying them bare as tributes to what could have been.”

Ezra let out something between a breath and a laugh. “But altars don’t give back. They burn what you give.”

He rubbed his palms together, as if cleansing them of ash. The bitterness still clung.

“It wasn’t love,” he whispered. “It was ritual.”

The drive came to a full stop. This was more than what the driver was prepared to endure.

But something in Ezra had shifted subtly, like dust settling after the flame had gone out.

He stood in the lot long after the cab disappeared down the street, his hand still gripping the Styrofoam. Then, without ceremony, he let it drop. The wind caught it, and it rolled gently across the pavement, coming to rest beneath the buzzing sign.

Ezra looked up at the sky, his breath finally even.

For the first time, he thought maybe he could say it—his name.

But not yet.

For now, it was enough not to feel like he had to confess it.