Dinging bicycle bells will always haunt us a little bit.
At first, the small, innocent chimes seem harmless—comforting, even. They remind us of childhood summers, with ice cream trucks and kids learning how to ride bikes, of lazy afternoons where the only worry we had was how fast a popsicle would melt. But for us, those chimes have become something else entirely. For the girls who have learned the weight of certain sounds, the once innocent ring of a bell or something as soft as a wind chime sends a different chill through our bodies.
Two bright young faces, cheeks hurting from laughter, hair swishing over their shoulders, lip gloss clutched in their palms—watching their night change in an instant. They see the spokes of bicycle tires, the shadowed figures propped in the air, the twisted grins that no longer seem just friendly. Those dings represent the beating of hearts pounding in and out of their chests, the frantic footsteps carrying their rigid frames closer and closer to restaurant doors. The dinging no longer means summer evenings and heated concrete; it means fear. It means a moment where control is stolen, where safety is shattered, where their big, wide world suddenly seems smaller, and every little sound carries a sinister undertone. And things will never be the same. We will always flinch slightly when we see blue-backpacked frames and hear bicycle tires and bells behind us, those sounds permanently embedded in our brains.
And there are hundreds of other girls. Lip gloss in hand, smiles across their cheeks, handbags on their shoulders—who went through the same thing. The ding of a notification on a phone can feel like a warning. The metallic click of a closing door can cause the most distracted of minds to turn. The small jingle of keys can send blood rushing to your ears—boiling, burning inside your mind.
I am lucky, though.
I’ve replaced that sound.
I’ve replaced it with the gasps of surprise when we hear gossip. The hours we spend cackling at something stupid no one else finds amusing, something ridiculous, something so purely us that, for a moment, the weight of the past doesn’t matter.
I’ve replaced it with the furiously typing fingers that fly across my keyboard after I make a typo, knowing you’re typing just as fast to correct it first. Every funny video, every funny message, every exchange—pouring laughter from our lungs so hard it keels us over.
I’ve replaced it with the soft click of a camera capturing a moment we want to keep rather than the one that was taken from us.
Because that’s the thing about reclaiming what is lost. The world doesn’t stop for pain. Time can’t freeze, undo, and repeat. But we have the power to reshape it, to choose what we hear, to drown out the dinging with something louder, something better.
We, and the thousands of girls, are often talked about in numbers, in statistics, in articles that blur together all the chaos of information. But behind every number, every average, is a person who flinches at a sound that others find unrecognizable. Society has learned to push these stories aside through lighthearted pleasantries and sickening looks of pity—to minimise the echoes, to tell girls to move on without giving them space to heal. But healing is not silence. Healing is noise.
Healing is filling the spaces where fear once reigned with the sounds that make life feel vibrant again, bringing blush to cheeks and joyful tears to eyes. It’s the inside jokes whispered across a classroom. It’s the rhythmic tapping of nails against a desk while lost in a tune playing in the air that only you can hear. It’s that chime of laughter, the ring of a friend’s voice calling your name. It’s replacing that dinging with something else, something that belongs to you again.
They may have taken the dinging.
But they will never take the rest.