The Medicine That Echoed in the Bells

Echo Park at twilight feels like a fever breaking in reverse. The air is thick, neon bleeding into the lotus pond until every ripple glows unnatural—pink, teal, a violet that doesn’t exist in daylight. Taco truck smoke curls upward and seems to hang in halos around the streetlights. I tell myself it’s just the way Los Angeles looks when you’ve been walking too long, but she tells me the city is speaking to us, reshaping itself because we’re together.

Her hand is warm, always a little too warm, like she’s running on a higher setting than the rest of the world. She tells me love is her medicine, that she can take any wound and turn it into art, that her whole life is about pulling people back from the edge. I believe her, because when she looks at me, it feels like I’ve been found at the bottom of a canyon and dragged into light.

The murals along Sunset hum with color, the kind of cheap spray paint that somehow outlasts earthquakes and heartbreak alike. Tonight, the faces in the paint seem to watch us, shifting subtly, their eyes following her more than me. She likes to stop in front of the Virgin Mary, tagged with rainbow streaks, and whisper,

see? Even the saints

approve of us.

I laugh because what else can you do when someone spins the world like that? I want it to be true. I want to believe the city approves.

She insists we sit by the lake, where the water doesn’t reflect the skyline so much as swallow it and spit back something better. Our own private Los Angeles, floating in black water. A coyote yips somewhere, sharp and lonely, but she grins and says,

that’s just our guardian

keeping watch.

I’ve never met someone who can make loneliness sound like protection.

There’s a diner off Sunset where the coffee tastes like burnt film reels and the booths stick to your thighs, and somehow that becomes our cathedral. We scribble tarot spreads on napkins, spilling cream and ink until the cards blur into new archetypes:

The Nurse,

The Muralist,

The Coyote.

She tells me these are ours, more real than the Rider-Waite because they belong to us. And I let her deal me futures like poker hands—each one a promise of healing. In one, she saves me from myself. In another, I save her from the ghosts. In all of them, love is the answer.

She says I remind her of Los Angeles itself: messy, fractured, but endlessly remaking, full of alleys where miracles can still hide. I don’t know if that’s praise or warning, but I accept it anyway.

At night, when the church bells start ringing, they don’t sound like bells anymore. They melt into synth chords, vibrating against my ribs. She hums along like she’s conducting it, like the whole city is her choir. And in that moment, I can’t tell where she ends and the world begins.

If there’s a spell, I’m already under it. And I don’t want to come up for air.

The nights stretch longer in her company, like Echo Park itself bends the clock to keep us walking. The taco trucks never seem too close, the same three men always laughing too loud over a game of cards in the shadows. She says the city is rewarding us—holding the lights green, keeping the streets open, for daring to love this hard. I don’t argue. It feels true.

She teaches me rituals, small at first. A candle lit on the hood of a parked car, balanced dangerously but somehow never tipping. A circle traced in spilled horchata on the sidewalk, her finger moving with quiet precision. “Every act can be devotion,” she says, “if you frame it that way.”

I like the way she makes the ordinary holy. It feels like proof I didn’t waste so many years on grief.

At the lake she paints promises across the surface with a flat stone, skipping it until the ripples overlap in patterns she insists are coded messages. I can’t read them, but I nod, because the conviction in her eyes is enough. She says the city is sending us blueprints. All we have to do is trust.

Sometimes she takes me to the murals at night. We carry cheap brushes and leftover paint, adding fragments no one will notice. A hand here, a streak of violet across a cheek, a mouth made sharper. I catch her painting my initials into the background, half-buried in color.

She says it’s so I’ll always be

part of the city, even if I

leave.

It sounds romantic until I

wake one morning and

wonder if she’s burying me

alive in color instead.

I push the thought away.

She’s better at faith than I

am.

Our diner becomes a temple. We sit in the same booth every time, back corner, where the jukebox hums but doesn’t play. She insists on ordering pie even when we’re too broke for pie, because sweetness is non-negotiable. We spread napkins across the table like a magician’s deck, sketching out new constellations. The Coyote, The Nurse, The Graffiti Saint. She says we’re inventing a mythology that will outlast us. I like the way her pen strokes spill off the napkin, down her arm, onto mine. It feels like being rewritten.

But not everything tastes holy. Sometimes when I mention friends, she cuts the subject sharp, folding napkins into nothing. “They don’t understand us,” she says, “They’ll try to dilute what we’re building.” Her voice doesn’t rise—it never rises—but it carries a quiet edge that makes me drop the subject. It’s easier to believe her. Easier to imagine that we’re a secret society of two, bound tighter than blood.

At night, the city sings to us. Murals glisten under streetlight, paint shimmering as though wet. Once, walking past the Virgin Mary with rainbow streaks, I swear I saw her painted lips move, whispering a word I couldn’t catch. I blink and it’s gone, but my lover hears it too. She squeezes my hand and says,

even the saints are restless

with joy for us.

I don’t ask if joy should sound like warning.

The church bells have changed again. They don’t melt into synths anymore. Now they stretch, each peal dragging, reverberating through the neighborhood until windows shake. My chest vibrates with the weight of them. She closes her eyes, smiling, humming louder. And I find myself humming too, because silence feels dangerous in her presence.

She calls love a medicine. She calls us holy. She calls me her proof. And I want so badly to believe it.

The murals are the first to betray me.

One night on Sunset, I catch the Virgin Mary’s face sliding—not a trick of shadow, not spray paint cracking, but sliding, like skin peeling off glass. Her rainbow streaks drip downward into a grin too sharp, too hungry. I blink hard, look away, then back, but the grin stays, faint and shimmering like heat mirage. She doesn’t notice, or pretends not to. She just whispers, she’s laughing with us.

But I hear it differently: her laughing at me.

The koi in the lake turn belly-up in my dreams. When I wake, their scales still glint on the inside of my eyelids, silver coins tossed into a well with no bottom. Once, walking the path, I swear the water stirs though the air is still. Something writhes beneath, but when I lean closer, it’s just my reflection, cut into ripples. My reflection, not hers.

The diner feels different, too. Our booth sticks harsher, like glue. The jukebox hum deepens until it rattles plates on the table. She says it’s just the city tuning itself to us, vibrating closer to truth. But her voice is a little too rehearsed, and I notice the way she glances at the couple in the next booth, their laughter souring her face. “They don’t understand devotion,” she mutters, stabbing her fork into pie she doesn’t eat.

Her devotion feels sharper these days, less like healing, more like claim.

Sometimes she sketches me in the margins of napkins. Faces layered over faces, mine warped, smeared, multiplied until I don’t recognize them. She calls them practice portraits. I try to laugh, but the drawings feel more like masks than mirrors.

The church bells don’t just vibrate now—they split. Sound fractures like glass, raining invisible shards through the neighborhood. Every strike leaves me dizzy, off-balance. She sways with it, arms raised as if catching blessings in her palms. I hold my ears but still feel the notes in my bones.

Once, I find her in the church itself. We’d never gone inside before, always circling the outside, letting the bells crown us. Inside, it smells of melted wax and old wood, pews empty but not silent. The air is thick, humming, like hundreds of breaths are trapped there. She stands at the pulpit, hands spread wide, whispering words I can’t catch. When she sees me, she smiles too brightly, like I’ve arrived right on cue.

“Do you feel it?” she asks,

“The whole city kneeling?”

But I don’t.

What I feel is the pews

watching me, wood grain

twisting into eyes, faces.

The air pressing against my

ribs like it’s trying to keep

me there.

And then there’s her friend—the one I overhear outside the diner. I’m coming back from the bathroom, steps slow, when I catch her saying,

“You’re so good at

reshaping them. You always

were.”

Her reply: a soft laugh.

“It’s not reshaping. It’s

refining.”

I stand frozen, pie cooling on the table. When I return, she’s all sweetness, sliding the napkin constellation toward me. My name stars brighter than hers this time.

That night, the murals don’t blink, they leer. The koi don’t just flip belly-up, they scatter, darting away from me as though I’m poison. The city feels complicit in her story, and I don’t know if it’s warning me or binding me tighter. I lie awake with her head on my chest, listening to the bells split the night open again and again, thinking: maybe love isn’t medicine at all. Maybe it’s a hunger she’s feeding. And maybe I’ve already been swallowed.

The night pulls me toward the church like gravity, like the bells themselves have wrapped a hook in my chest. Each strike ricochets inside me, hollowing me out, vibrating marrow. I don’t even remember deciding to walk there. I’m just suddenly climbing the steps, doors yawning open though no one touches them.

Inside, the pews are full.

At first, I think it’s strangers. Then I look closer, and my stomach drops. Each face is someone I’ve lost. My father, eyes still glassy from cirrhosis. My first girlfriend, her hair damp from the rink, mouth curled the way it did when she was about to cry and laugh at once. Patients I held until they trembled quiet. Friends I drifted from, exes who never said goodbye.

They don’t look at me.

They sit perfectly still,

bodies folding into the

wood, eyes fixed on the

altar.

Not a single blink.

The air smells of wax, but also iron. My tongue tastes metallic, as though I’ve bitten it.

And she is there, at the pulpit.

Her arms are spread wide, dress bleeding colors that drip down the altar steps like paint. Her voice pours through the space, sweet and venomous, the exact pitch of the bells but wrapped in flesh.

“Love is the medicine,” she

says, echoing off the

rafters.

“And I am the cure.”

The crowd exhales together, a single sigh, and the sound shudders the floor. My knees want to bend, but I fight it, gripping the pew in front of me. The wood grain twists beneath my palms into a face, mouthing silent prayers.

Her eyes catch me, pin me. They are too bright, two murals come to life, color spilling out and staining the air.

“Do you see?” she calls,

her voice stretching longer

than a human voice should.

“I take them in. I keep them

safe. I turn ruin into

beauty.”

Behind her, the mural blossoms like wet paint. At first, it’s a swirl of saints and angels, faces bright. Then my stomach lurches—because it’s me. My face, multiplied, fractured across the wall. One smiling, one crying, one hollow-eyed, one painted mouth sewn shut.

I step back, but the pews groan, pressing against my thighs, trapping me. The crowd still doesn’t turn. All those versions of love I lost, lined up, obedient.

Her voice softens.

“You wanted saving. You

begged for it. Didn’t you?”

The mural mouths open, my own face spilling words I don’t recognize. My chest tightens—are those my prayers, the ones I thought no one heard? I shake my head, but the mural keeps talking. Each version of me looks less like me and more like mask, more like the napkin sketches she drew, ink blurring until only the outline of her initials remain.

“No,” I whisper,

but my voice vanishes into

the wood.

She steps down from the altar, and with each step the church stretches taller, wider, warping like heat. The pews loom into towers of faces, the ceiling ripples like water. The bells slam down through the rafters, making me gag.

She takes my hand, presses it to her chest. Her heart beats too fast, frantic, hungry.

“Don’t you understand?”

she says.

“This is what healing is. I

consume it. I consume you.

And then you live forever in

me.”

Her smile is wide enough to

split her face.

Paint drips from her lips.

Behind her, the mural

versions of me scream

silently, mouths unhinged,

eyes rolling.

The pews tilt, and suddenly I realize the church is sinking. The floor slides toward the altar, dragging me with it, toward her open arms. The air thickens, syrupy, each breath like swallowing tar. For one dizzy second, I want to let it happen. To collapse into her, to be remade, even if it means being erased.

But then I see my father’s face in the pews—blank, lifeless, trapped. My first girlfriend’s eyes glassy with the same stillness. The patients, the friends, every love gone rigid under her sermon.

And I understand.

This isn’t salvation.

It’s embalming.

She doesn’t heal—she

hoards.

She cages.

I tear my hand back. The mural flickers, the faces glitch. The bells crack mid-strike, splitting into static. She hisses like paint poured onto fire.

The pews release me, wood grain sloughing off into dust. I stumble toward the doors, lungs clawing for air, and when I look back, she’s still at the altar, arms spread wide, paint pouring from her eyes. The mural writhes behind her, all my faces burning white.

Her voice follows me out into the night, louder than the bells.

“You can’t leave what I’ve

made of you.”

The church spits me out into the Echo Park night. The air outside is cool, almost ordinary, but it feels wrong on my skin, too light after all that heaviness. My ears are still ringing, not with bells now but with the echo of her voice, stretched and torn, promising she’ll never let me go.

The city hasn’t quieted. It’s holding its breath. The murals along Sunset blink as I pass, but they don’t speak. Their colors run in slow drips, paint tears sliding down cheeks that refuse to meet my eyes. I keep walking, afraid if I stop they’ll peel open again and swallow me whole. The lake is black glass, perfectly still, no koi, no ripples. My reflection stares back—singular, at least, though my face looks too pale, too sharp, like it’s been cut out and glued to the water. I half expect her hand to reach up through it, to pull me under.

But the surface holds.

I sit on the bench anyway, because what else is there to do? A coyote yips from the hills, thin and wild, and this time I don’t believe it’s a guardian. It’s just hunger with teeth. And that feels truer than anything she’s ever told me.

For a long time I just breathe, chest raw, hands still shaking. My shirt smells faintly of wax and iron. My ribs ache with the memory of those bells.

She said love was medicine.

She said she healed me.

But now I see it clearer:

medicine can be poison in

the wrong hands.

Healing isn’t ownership,

isn’t worship, isn’t painting

someone’s face until they

can’t see their own.

I wanted saving, yes.

But not like that.

The diner lights flicker in the distance, but I don’t go in. The idea of the booth, the pie, the napkin sketches, it curdles. I don’t want to see her handwriting carved into me anymore. Instead I watch the lotus pond. The blossoms glow faintly, pale against the water, their roots tangled deep in the mud. They rise anyway. That’s the trick.

I think maybe healing is

more like that.

Not being rewritten.

Not being claimed, but

rising messy and rooted in

your own soil.

The night drifts on. Murals fade to stillness, windows dim, the city’s pulse slows. I sit there until my reflection blends with the sky, until it’s just me and the outline of palms against the dark.

When I finally stand, the church is gone from sight, swallowed into the hill, though I know it’s still there. Maybe it always will be, waiting, paint dripping in silence, her arms wide.

But I walk away anyway.

The bells don’t follow this time.

DEDICATION

For anyone who has loved someone whose mind turned against them—whether by illness, disorder, or the sharp edges of their own survival. You carried devotion through storms that were never yours to calm. This story is not a mirror, but a hand held out in recognition. May you find a love that does not cage.