Dan Fishback: A lost piece of yourself, found bounding about College Hall

In September, after the attacks, most of us had trouble keeping our heads in one place. We were scattered to say the least. I, for one, felt like I could only be either everywhere or nowhere at any given moment. In one second, I could barely straddle all of the worries and paranoias and anxieties. In the next: numb, vacant oblivion.

I was in one of those oblivions a few days after it all happened. I was walking around the third floor of College Hall when I ran into this British boy from class. Then, oblivion started to fill in with data and queries: "Why is his shirt so short?" "I can see his stomach." "He can't weigh more than 125 pounds." And before I could ask how the international community was dealing with the crisis, he smiled and started chattering: "This building has so many stairs!"

It was the first post-attack conversation I'd had that didn't have anything to do with... anything.

"We don't have majors in England -- I only study the history of the Americas."

"Yeah? Well, you drive on the wrong side of the road."

"Well, we invented civilization."

It was the first of many talks, which slowly progressed from idle chit-chat to substance. We actually began talking about serious things: cosmetics, dancing, Kylie Minogue. Love and life, too, eventually. But for the time being, there was no better way to punctuate a day of apocalyptic stress than a chat about ideal boyfriends over a Rice Krispie square in Houston Hall.

I felt like the Ed Norton character in Fight Club. It felt like I was talking to a bizarre slice of my own mind, like a tiny repressed smidgen of my brain had materialized in front of me in the form of a boarding school gym bunny with an arsenal of moisturizers and eye creams.

He was no Brad Pitt, but I couldn't help but feel like I was talking to my middle school alter-ego -- the one who spent every afternoon watching Absolutely Fabulous and E! Entertainment Television, the expert on the latest designers and fresh Hollywood gossip, the one who I beat into submission during high school, when I decided to switch from E! to PBS.

I thought he was gone for good, but apparently he just flew to England and started working out. And after eight months of what feels like reconciliation, my brain is no longer scattered. I'm in relation to things now. I'm part of a polarity, a complementarity. It's what happens to us when we find a friend who could just as easily be an enemy -- a person with every outward mark of difference, but an unmistakable, invisible sameness.

If you think of yourself as generally outside of things, it's easy to feel a certain polar relationality at a place like Penn. When you're surrounded by khaki, it's easy to feel anchored in pleather. When you distrust authority, it's easy to feel purposeful at a place so pre-professional, so conservative, so structured. But it's not an anchor that keeps you safe -- it's an anchor that keeps you from moving. It's an opposition without affection, and a conflict without interplay. The divisions and forces are too obscure.

If we can only know who we are by knowing who we're not, then the process of self-discovery is best when both ends of the spectrum kind of like each other a whole lot.

On a larger level, if whole groups of people can only find cultural solidarity in terms of difference -- if cultures are truly relational -- then peace will only come with the bizarre, inexplicable affection that every so often miraculously traverses even the most monumental distinctions. The kind that treks through all that foreignness to find common ground. The kind that realizes in the end those differences are for naught.

We're all just embodiments of each other's idiosyncrasies. And in that sense, getting to know each other is an awful lot like therapy.

Henry goes back to London soon, and I can't say I'm not a little worried that I'll feel less defined, less characterized. It's not really something one says out loud very often, especially not around British people.

So when I was struggling for a topic for my last column of the semester, and he said, "Why don't you write about me and how I've changed your life for the better?" I didn't dare reply that I'd thought of it already, or that half of it was already written in my head.

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