Here We Go Again: A Listicle
By Aisling Walsh
Listen to Aisling reading her story:
He wins you over with Etta. He wants to make love to you, he croons in your ear. It would have been creepy if the song hadn’t been playing at the bar. You laugh and let him away with it, surprised he, or anyone, even noticed you.
He dances in the front row to Alanis and it’s ironic, you think, how he left you queuing for drinks.
He hums along to Ani’s strumming, pupils dilated, feeling the full weight of the struggling artist. He’s the real Napolean, not them he tells you. ‘They don’t know art, they just don’t get me, you know? Not like you, you believe in what I do.’ You smile, because it’s true, write another check for his tuition and fantasise about all you’ll do when it’s your turn to quit your day job and follow your dreams.
He comes back from the Nina gig buzzing. ‘Did you know it’s still so hard for Blacks to just live in America?’ He doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘And Baltimore, wow… we should really finish watching The Wire, it’s so real, so gritty, you know? Just like Nina, man! She gets it, yaaas,’ he says, doing his best impression of a 1920s Harlem jazz bro. ‘Shame we couldn’t find a babysitter, you’d have loved her.’
‘Laurie’s the true artist,’ he says. ‘Better than Lou ever was. She didn’t lose herself to drugs.’ But her strange angels sing just for him. As soon as he leaves for work you switch to Beyoncé or Brittney or Gaga, scrubbing spit, vomit and mashed-up food off the linoleum floor to their pop beats.
Polly Jean’s his gal, his one true love. But so skinny. ‘Too skinny,’ he says shaking his head. ‘At least you don’t have to worry about that anymore.’ He pinches your belly. You smooth your t-shirt over a tummy three pregnancies have stretched from an eight to a twelve. He says he doesn’t mind your legs puckered with cellulite, nor your breasts flapping from half a decade of suckling infants.
Patti rages on the stereo. He pulls you away from the sink and spins you around the linoleum. He laughs at the yellow rubber gloves, calls them sexy, while he nuzzles your neck. You shrink from his grasp. ‘It’s late, you’re tired, the kids have school in the morning,’ you say by way of an excuse. ‘Don’t worry about all that,’ he says. Tonight belongs to us.’ His breath is heavy, insistent. You don’t fight, not anymore. He calls it love, and brings it each night whether you want it or not.
Tori’s earthquakes ripple through your world. You hate the fighting followed by silences, lasting days. You hate how long it took to realise you were already torn to pieces, disintegrating. The rage in those verses – those men with their guns, those women on their stomachs – makes you tremble. But he has no time for your pain, so you disappear to the kitchen whenever he clicks play on those clanging piano keys.
He’s Emma and you’re Alan from your favourite holiday rom-com, leaving a wrapped CD, Joni’s greatest hits, under the tree for him. There were many other things you could have gifted him but playing house and playing Santa got in the way. You’d like to watch the movie on Christmas day, giggle at your own inside joke but, he insists on something with a strong-female-lead. You try to keep your eyelids from drooping over two hours of a naked Kirsten touching herself under the light of Melancholia’s astral menace. You find out soon after that he’s having an affair. He was Alan all along.
He used to whisper nothing compares, alá Sinéad, not Prince. But really he was just waiting for new candidates, young and childfree, to measure you against. In the end you were found wanting. Demanding, frigid and hysterical, were the words he used to justify his departure. Now you’re more needy than ever, waiting with your three babies for a check that never comes. Your belly rumbles at night from the dinners you skip so they won’t go hungry.
He left a stack of CDs behind, all his favourite divas, the only women deemed meritorious of his attention. Patti, Aimee, Janis, et al. The ones he kept on a first name basis, as if they were friends. You suspect their words have the power to save you from the ranks of freaks, the jilted wives, the single mothers, who’ve never been loved by this country. But you can’t listen to their refrains without the urge to scrub the sticky residue of his paws off your body.
Aisling Walsh (she/her) is a queer and neurodivergent writer based in Co. Clare, Ireland. Her short stories, essays and features have been published in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Irish Times, Jezebel, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, Púca, the 2024 From the Well anthology and others. She won the Listowel Writers' Week creative writing award (2024) and her essays shortlisted in the Phoebe (2022) and So to Speak (2021) CNF contests. She was awarded an Irish Writers Centre Bursary in 2024 and an Arts & Disability Connect mentoring grant in 2023. She is a fiction reader at Anomaly. You can find her on substack at
where she writes essays about movies and neurodivergence.