There’s Something I’ve Been Meaning to Say To You. fiction by Danila Botha

There’s Something I’ve Been Meaning to Say To You

“I just laughed, what else could I do? And her friend chimed in singing get a clue/

 Get a life, put it in your song/ There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you…”

~Brendan Benson, Metarie

I wrote my first message and displayed it in my kitchen window, which anyone passing my ground floor apartment could see easily. It was a long sign, in black pen, in my sloping handwritten script, and it was a huge contrast to all the people who’d colorfully thanked first responders in the first wave and never bothered to take their signs down.

There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you. Sometimes I miss the things we used to do together. Going to farmer’s markets full of local craftspeople selling overpriced infinity scarves and handmade moisturizer made in someone’s bathroom that smelled vaguely of lemongrass and lavender, that you insisted on buying for me. I miss the vegan organic restaurants you’d drag me to that I thought would be terrible, but often weren’t. I miss you taking me for walks on Woodbine beach, where that’s all we did. I miss you taking me to Fringe festival plays that I didn’t think were funny, or music showcases where you complained that the guitarist’s E string was flat, and I nodded like I understood what you meant. I miss watching you eat deep fried shrimp and fries while you never gained a pound. I miss going to Kensington and spending our last five dollars and change for something we’d never end up wearing from Courage My Love. I miss secretly reading your diary, where you were freer and more confident than you ever were in real life. I miss watching you show off gold jewelry your boyfriend bought you, so proud I’d almost forget that he’d cheated on you.

At first no one said anything about the sign, but then neighbors I’d never properly met, people who lived in the building or even in some of the nearby houses, people whose names I’d never learned even after six years of living here, started talking to me. It had always been weird to rent an apartment in one of the two low rise buildings in a sea of very expensive houses and condo units. It was a safe neighborhood, with beautiful ravines, and green spaces, where everyone was polite but I still didn’t have a single friend.

Suddenly people started telling me about their break ups, and we’d stand on the sidewalk outside my building, smoking or drinking cold coffee, exchanging stories about our lives. Maybe the pandemic had made us all lonelier, and more eager to share. Maybe we were all thinking too much, desperate to share our new epiphanies.

I decided to keep going. I went to the dollar store and got two boxes of the thinnest sidewalk chalk I could find. I went out into the back parking lot after midnight, using the flashlight on my phone. I wrote all over every empty parking spot. Some were immediately smudged and erased when cars were parked in them, others were judiciously avoided.

There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you. I’ll never forgive you for the way you dropped me. I’d worked so hard to be a presence in your life and boy, did you make me earn it. Your childhood traumas don’t justify your behavior. Lots of people have shitty parents or get bullied; some people learn that in life there’s only an aggressor and a victim, and nothing in between. I wish it had made you more self-aware and more empathetic. There’s a great scene about this in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I wish we were still friends so we could still talk about books. I miss the way you analyzed movies. I loved the Virgin Suicides until you said it seemed like Coppola had a girl crush on Kristen Dunst, the book had so much more depth, you argued. Remember when we were fifteen, and we went to see the movie Titanic at the movie theatre in Yorkdale? Neither of us liked it. We were like two pop culture voyeurs, watching something teenagers were supposed to like, just to say we actually did it. Remember when we were thirteen, and you said it was embarrassing that I liked the Spice Girls, and then you explained to me what a prefabricated group was? Remember when we were seventeen, driving around in your car, listening to the Doors? Blasting Jim Morrison’s lyrics embarrassed me.

I walked around the neighborhood and noticed all the signs on telephone poles, for dog walkers and babysitting and window cleaning and housekeeping. I envied people who could still work, while I sat inside, immunocompromised from the biologics I had to insert into my arm once a week with a spring- loaded needle. While I waited for my next vaccine, I read online about autoimmune conditions like mine, Ankylosing Spondylitis and Covid and why people thought if something happened to me, it would be because of my “pre-existing condition.” I read about people’s resentment that they had to keep thinking about people who were probably just going to die anyway.

I scribbled on a blank piece of paper and borrowed a heavy duty stapler from Amy in the apartment next door.

There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you.  When we were friends, I was the definition of insane, trying so hard, again and again hoping things would be different. I blocked you on one social media platform, you blocked me on two others. I didn’t think you still thought about me, but I bumped into a former friend of yours and she said you talked about me all the time. She said you were obsessed with my career. She also called you a narcissist and something in me released. I stopped focusing on lies I knew I’d told you, on the stupid ways I’d created to save face around you because you made me feel so inadequate. I didn’t know how different we were. It was okay for you to have a persona, to exaggerate your successes, to inflate yourself so your achievements hung over everyone like the shadow of a punctured balloon, but it wasn’t okay for anyone else.

There’s Something I’ve Been Meaning to Say to You. When we had coffee in that café on Roncesvalles, a flourish of your stiff, blazer jacketed arms, a sweep of your impossibly long legs when you offered to pay for me, but were forty minutes late. All I cost you was five dollars and twelve cents. All I could think about was the time we met at your house in the Annex where you were moving, years earlier. I didn’t see your offhand callousness coming. After that, If I saw you around, you were friendly, but pretended not to really remember me. Then you acted like I mattered, again if only briefly. When you grilled me about my past you forgot to ask me one important question: what I learned from it. Here’s the answer you wouldn’t have wanted to hear: I learned not to trust people like you.

On one of my walks I passed a wet, newly paved sidewalk. I grabbed a stick and before anyone noticed I carved in There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you. When you find a way to contradict me, when you try to poke a hole in my perception, it makes me pity you. I waited for someone to complain or someone to call the city, but no one did.

A week later, there were three little kids who’d set up a lemonade stand two houses down from my apartment. Summer was over, so it was a little weird, but the schools were still closed and I guess the kids were bored. I bought a cup, and a chocolate chip cookie, and kept walking. They left the stand out over overnight, so they were set up for the next day. That night I scribbled something down on a small piece of notebook paper and taped it to the side.

There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you, my goals are meaningful to me. I don’t like to talk about them, I prefer to just get them done.

For Halloween, none of the kids were allowed to trick or treat, but all the houses decorated their lawns with gravestones and skeletons. My favourite was the giant house on the corner, with a gravestone that said I did my own research.

I bought a smaller, pale beige gravestone decoration from the Dollar store down the street, wrote on it with a thick, black Sharpie, then snuck onto their lawn, and put it right beside it.

There’s something I’ve meaning to say to you. I see your out of control, unmedicated anxiety. You probably can’t see my autoimmune disorder. I go to great lengths to hide it. Stop treating me, and people like me like our lives our disposable, like we’re weak, like we did something wrong because what we want is to continue to exist.

I didn’t know if I had gone too far, if people had started to get angry, if I’d gotten too intensely into all of this. I was having dreams about becoming a graffiti artist, writing sentences on bridges and freeways.

I decided to do one more. I cut a piece of blank paper into a small heart, like the glowing neon heart lights I’d seen in windows all over the city. I wrote on it and put it in the corner of my bedroom window, where anyone who passed the building could see it.

There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you. I cried when people criticized my work in the past, but I cried more thinking about you not bothering to think about it or read it. All I wanted was for you to see me.

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Danila Botha is the author of three short story collections, Got No Secrets, For All the Men…which was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, The Vine Awards and the ReLit Award. Her new collection, Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness will be published in March 2024 by Guernica Editions. She is also the author of the novel Much on the Inside which was recently optioned for film. Her new novel, A Place for People Like Us will be published by Guernica in 2025. She teaches Creative Writing at University of Toronto’s SCS and is part of the faculty at Humber School for Writers. She is currently writing and illustrating her first graphic novel.

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