Bob Dylan - The Man in Me: metacafe.com/watch/4343906/bob_dylan_the_man_in_me/
My first night in Toronto. I was to stay the night with a friend, Brooklyn, downtown before moving into a room in my cousins Brampton house. Brooklyn was having a birthday party that night and invited me to meet her there, in a bar in Kensington. I wandered then went early, nothing to do, drank by myself and was hit on by charming and aggressive men as I waited. I was here. I was ready.
I found myself in the night at a table with two beautiful girls and an acquaintance, I gravitated toward the acquaintance for I stupidly assumed these two beautiful girls, being beautiful, were likely dull and uninterested in such an alien. Then, being left alone against my wishes with these two beautiful girls I feigned to make conversation for it was all I knew. One of them, Hannah, told me that she was an actress. She had studied classical theatre, she had been an Iago and she had been a Juliet.
And I was transfixed. We talked for an hour untouched by any other drunken body in the room. She told me her histories and of Israel and of her Father. She told me of her home and of her friends, of the theatre, asked me of the East and my visions of Toronto. I was empty of experience at her side, had nothing to offer and so when she left I let her without a word.
It was some weeks before I was able to find a home in Toronto, a means of survival, somewhere to lay my head and myself. And I found her somehow. And I asked her to meet me and she agreed. And we met. And I was bold and she showed me many varied forms of beauty. She told me I was trouble. She was something I'd never known and she let me.
It wasn't long, though, before she put it all to some form of rest. She called me and said she couldn't, I said I could and she agreed to meet me once more and then alone, the next day. An infinity can occur between seconds, I found. As I walked toward her there was a newspaper headline of the frequency of breakups at this particular time of year. I knew what I was walking into. And I wondered, when we finally met and she cried and she told me it was over and Bob Dylan's "The Man in Me" played above me on the coffee shop speakers, her figure far behind her as an Iago and a Juliet, is my life a some form of tragedy or comedy?
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