This is what it feels like when your city comes under attack: It’s revolting.

Initially that revulsion comes at a gut level — the queasy suspicion that loved ones might have been among the victims, or you, had it been on another night, or on another street.

Then the whole world seems surreally in revolt. Like thousands of other Londoners, I go to the South Bank every day. TIME’s offices are little more than a five-minute walk from Borough Market, where the three terrorists cut through the crowds with knives. I’ve been going to those bars and restaurants for years. This was an attack on the way ordinary people, people like me, live our lives. This was personal.

It’s an experience shared by city-dwellers around the world, often at a far more sustained and deadly level — from Manchester to Mumbai, from Kabul to Istanbul. To many Londoners, it’s a reminder of 2005, when terrorists bombed the London Underground and a city bus.

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