I Guess I'll Never Get To Call You Mine
ALINE
I hung up the phone again, upset. “I got voice mail again.” “Maybe he’s busy,” Marcus suggested, strumming a chord on his acoustic guitar. It’s Friday night, and my brothers and I were sprawled out in the living room of the apartment we rented. We’re supposed to be writing music, but Sean and Jason are watching TV and Randy’s busy killing aliens on his Nintendo. “He’s been busy for almost three weeks!” I said in frustration. “He won’t let us see him, he doesn’t call…I’m worried.” “Relax, Sis, you didn’t even keep in much touch with him over the years until this chance reunion. You’ve gone longer than three weeks not speaking to him,” Marc shrugged. “Yes, but…you don’t understand,” I said. “Something’s wrong.”
Marcus is right of course. By the time Simple Plan and The Youngbloods are formed, we’ve all gone our separate ways. We kept in sporadic contact, and there can be times when I won’t see Chuck in months. Our infrequent meetings would usually be friendly but brief, a shadow of an almost forgotten friendship. When Randy and I went back to Montréal and I spent more time with him…it’s like suddenly I was back in high school again and never left. It all came back to me—years of suppressed memories—it all came flooding back. Playing hockey in the winter, pranking Jeff on his birthday, eating ice cream after school…all the golden childhood days we went through together.
It’s not like I’m feeling nostalgic. It’s like I’m seeing him again for the first time, and suddenly he’s Charles-André Comeau again, not the Simple Plan drummer or all what he’s become during his career with Simple Plan, but my classmate and next-door neighbor, my best friend and trusted confidant.
We’d started to catch up, and I realized I hadn’t spent this much time with him since I moved to Ottawa when we were both still teenagers. Crazy as it sounds, I’d almost forgotten how much fun it was being around him. Underneath the man and professional musician he’d become, I can still see the same boy who I walked to school with everyday.
This special feeling of being together again is not exactly same as when we were younger of course, but was instead reimbursed with a mutual sense of affection between two adults remembering the good old days gone past, as well as a desire to get to know the people we’ve become during those long years that we weren’t together. It’s like we’re re-establishing our friendship, picking up where we left on since we were both seventeen. I hadn’t realized how much I missed him, and if it’s possible to miss a person this much.
There was a time when Chuck and I knew each other so well that we understood each other so well that we can tell what the other was feeling simply by just knowing. Being with him again…it reawakened all those protective senses toward my childhood best friend, and instinctively I know that he’s in trouble. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that something’s up of course, but I feel like there’s something else. It’s as if Charles is in pain, but as noble and gentlemanlike as he always is, decides to suffer it alone.
Marcus is right of course. By the time Simple Plan and The Youngbloods are formed, we’ve all gone our separate ways. We kept in sporadic contact, and there can be times when I won’t see Chuck in months. Our infrequent meetings would usually be friendly but brief, a shadow of an almost forgotten friendship. When Randy and I went back to Montréal and I spent more time with him…it’s like suddenly I was back in high school again and never left. It all came back to me—years of suppressed memories—it all came flooding back. Playing hockey in the winter, pranking Jeff on his birthday, eating ice cream after school…all the golden childhood days we went through together.
It’s not like I’m feeling nostalgic. It’s like I’m seeing him again for the first time, and suddenly he’s Charles-André Comeau again, not the Simple Plan drummer or all what he’s become during his career with Simple Plan, but my classmate and next-door neighbor, my best friend and trusted confidant.
We’d started to catch up, and I realized I hadn’t spent this much time with him since I moved to Ottawa when we were both still teenagers. Crazy as it sounds, I’d almost forgotten how much fun it was being around him. Underneath the man and professional musician he’d become, I can still see the same boy who I walked to school with everyday.
This special feeling of being together again is not exactly same as when we were younger of course, but was instead reimbursed with a mutual sense of affection between two adults remembering the good old days gone past, as well as a desire to get to know the people we’ve become during those long years that we weren’t together. It’s like we’re re-establishing our friendship, picking up where we left on since we were both seventeen. I hadn’t realized how much I missed him, and if it’s possible to miss a person this much.
There was a time when Chuck and I knew each other so well that we understood each other so well that we can tell what the other was feeling simply by just knowing. Being with him again…it reawakened all those protective senses toward my childhood best friend, and instinctively I know that he’s in trouble. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that something’s up of course, but I feel like there’s something else. It’s as if Charles is in pain, but as noble and gentlemanlike as he always is, decides to suffer it alone.