I was forty minutes into a full set of acrylics and still running the same conversation with him in my head I’ve been running since October. My hands were pinned flat and useless under somebody else’s, so I ran the one where I finally say the thing that makes him understand what he did, and I’ve gotten so good at that one he has excellent lines in it now. Then the topcoat went on and the salon speakers dropped into the gap between songs, and four seconds of nothing in a room was enough to put me back on the last message he ever sent me, which was “yeah” at 11pm on a Thursday. The sensible version of this has been explained to me by every woman I love and every one of them is right, which has changed shit-all. I would take him back before the polish dried and I’ve made my peace with that in a way I think would genuinely upset a licensed professional. Ashleigh Stoker wrote ‘Sitting with the Silence’ from inside that same gap and she has no interest whatsoever in climbing out of it.
The production on this one sets Ashleigh’s sad-girl ballad down beside me with a bartender’s heavy pour and enough unresolved heartbreak to ruin my evening properly. The piano just pushes its way in, and there’s this acoustic guitar underneath keeping the whole thing breathing. The backing vocals show up eventually because somebody in this fucking mess needed to be there for her, and the man who put her in the chair had already failed the assignment. She is singing from that infuriating stage of heartbreak where your brain is fully online and you know every reasonable thought is correct. You just aggressively ignore it anyway, because wanting him has become its own muscle memory. I know that chair. I swear to God, I wanted to pour us both another glass and physically pry her phone out of her hand before the silence started looking like an invitation to double-text him. There is no toxic positivity on this track, none of that “we will heal and grow” bullshit. Some nights you don’t want the club and you don’t want to fix it. You just sit in the shit with a refill and let it hurt.
All she wants from him at the top of this song is a place in his day again, and she’ll take it secondhand from his mother if that’s the only door still open to her. “I hope your mum still asks about me to remind you / Of what you did to leave me crying in my room”. Deploying his mother as an unpaid haunting service is diabolical work and I have built the identical plan around a woman in Ohio who once told me I had a nice laugh. The wish stays small on purpose, because all Ashleigh needs is his mum saying her name over Sunday dinner until he flinches into his roast, and she sings it soft enough that it takes a second to register how cold it is.
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Petty is survivable. What she asks next is the thing I’ve been avoiding since October and she puts it in the first verse like it costs her nothing. “Cause I don’t think you remember what we had / And if you don’t, then what even was that?” Being the only one still holding the file is a very particular flavor of lonely and it’s the thought I refuse to look at directly, because if he isn’t carrying any of this then I’ve been maintaining a whole fucking relationship by myself since October. She follows it with “Cause I thought what we had couldn’t be lost” and that’s the sentence I would like to argue with. She believed the thing was load-bearing and permanent as shit, and so did I, which apparently makes the two of us the only shareholders left.
Whatever she’s been doing to stay upright, she names it in the chorus and it’s the same thing I’ve been calling coping. “I’ve been sitting with the silence that you left me / Trying not to let the damage through”. Damage getting through is such an honest way to put it because heartbreak seeps in around the edges for months and you spend your evenings holding a door shut against a flood you’re already standing in. I hold that door with one hand and check his story with the other, which nobody would call a fucking strategy, and the trying is the whole tell.
Anybody can admit they miss him. Admitting you’d pick him over your own recovery in the same breath takes something else, and she does it four bars later. “And I know I should choose peace over bleeding / But I still choose you”. Choose is the word doing all the labor, because she has the full picture sitting right there in front of her and she takes him anyway. Then she gets to the line the song was built to hold: “Cause if there’s one thing, one love, one person I never buried, it’s you”. Everybody else got a funeral and a nice service. He gets a fucking guest room with the lights left on and clean towels, indefinitely, because she has decided that he does.
His mum was only the first place she went looking for herself in his life, and by verse two she’s recruiting the entire map into it. “I hope that all the times we shared still cross your mind / And all the places that we went and left behind”. Places are the cruelest item on the inventory because they keep operating without your sad ass. That pub is still serving and the car park where you had the good conversation is still full of other people’s cars on a Tuesday. She’s out here hoping geography does the haunting on her behalf and I have driven past one specific Shell station twice this month with nothing to buy, so the strategy has my full endorsement.
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Every one of these women has a ranking system for her own heartbreaks whether she admits it or not, and Ashleigh puts hers on the record in the bridge. “I’ve been heartbroken before / But it never felt quite this sore”. Sore is such an unglamorous damn word and that’s why it works, because it’s the ache four days out from the gym when the drama has worn off and you’re just tender everywhere. She follows with “I’ve survived this kind of ending before / But this story felt far too short” and there’s the actual injury underneath all of it, which is that she was not done with him. The thing got cancelled mid-season with a full arc still written, and no amount of surviving previous endings prepares a woman for the one that ends while she’s still interested.
Ashleigh Stoker is a young UK singer-songwriter with a strong Folkestone connection and a catalogue devoted to the feelings most people swear they handled with dignity. She was 19 when coverage caught up with her first two singles, ‘Never Be Olivia’ and ‘Attempted Murder’, so she had already turned body-image pressure and heartbreak into public evidence before most of us learned to stop checking his fucking Instagram. The Folkestone Songwriting Festival supported her through its scholarship program, and she built stage experience around Kent before playing Cameo Sessions in London. She also announced a BBC Introducing spin on Radio Kent for ‘Cheat on Me’. Eight singles in under two years have carried her from her August 2024 debut to ‘Sitting with the Silence’. The releases are listed as independent, which makes that pace even more impressive and deeply rude to everyone who has spent six months “perfecting” one chorus. Stoker has made romantic damage her business. Honestly, that may be the cleanest mission statement in pop because Stoker knows heartbreak does not become classy because you put on mascara and order the expensive wine.
My nails came out incredible and the reply went out three days later with dry hands and a perfectly reasonable hour stamped on it. He read it and started typing twice, which I know because I sat there watching, and that was the best fucking twenty seconds of my month. Nothing about that requires a follow-up or a lesson, it just felt very good and I’d like it to happen again. Ashleigh is sat in her silence with the glass still full and no plans to be talked out of it, and ‘Sitting with the Silence’ works because she never once pretends she’d do any of this differently.
