Deathbed Peyote Confession

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I am lying in a bed that feels like the world’s last tortilla, warm and thin and trembling with the breath of the universe, and everyone I have ever known has arrived wearing the faces of tiny curious animals. Their eyes blink like living buttons. Their whiskers hum with quiet questions. They sit politely on the wallpaper, the floorboards, the polished knobs of the dresser, as if waiting for me to invent a religion before dinner.

Above me grows the brain I misplaced somewhere between the desert and a hotel room in Tucson. It hangs there like a chandelier stitched from cactus roots and old sins, pulsing politely, every lobe crowded with turtles, puppies, saints, and peaches. They all stare down with the same look my mother once gave me when I announced I was going to live a simple life devoted to complicated things. I can’t tell if they’re disappointed or amused. Maybe both. Maybe they’re the same thing.

A nurse drifts past and turns into a choir made entirely of beetles singing in gentle falsetto. She tucks me in with a kindness so big it nearly knocks me out of my own story. I want to tell her I love her the way I love broken radios—purely, because they still hum with invisible songs—but instead a garden of tiny mouths blooms from my chest and does the speaking for me. They gossip softly about the shape of eternity, as if it’s a neighborhood scandal.

You asked for a confession and I have one, although it might not mean anything anymore. Long ago I swallowed a button of bitter desert light, thinking I would meet God. Instead I met my own furniture rearranging itself into opinions. I saw that everything I thought was permanent was actually just shy, trembling at the idea of existing. I learned that fear is simply the organ that pumps mystery through the veins. I learned that love is just a handshake between two hallucinations deciding to trust each other anyway.

I didn’t become holy. I didn’t become wise. I just became a little softer around the edges, like bread left out long enough to understand sadness. I carried that softness like a secret coin no one would accept as payment. I wanted to tell the world, “It’s all alive. Even the boring parts.” But the world just nodded and went back to work.

Now the bed sails gently across nothing. The strange animals around me bow their heads like parishioners in a church made of weather. Above, the brain-flower shutters its many eyes, and all the little creatures return quietly to wherever dreams rent apartments. I’m left with the simple truth blooming on my tongue: I was afraid, I was astonished, and I loved more than I admitted. That’s the whole story.

The room exhales. I let go like a leaf surrendering to gravity’s soft handwriting. And for once, nothing demands to be explained.