Recently I realized that I feel a strange sense of nostalgia for the weeks following 9/11. My sophomore year of college had just begun, and I had freshly lost my virginity over the summer. I can obviously only comment on my own experience, but the days and weeks following the attacks were unbelievably surreal. I was living in a dorm on Fifth Avenue and 10th Street, just north of Washington Square Park, so I used to be able to see the World Trade Center towering over the Washington Square arch from the front door of my building (this location made it sort of weird the morning of; I have no idea what it says about my psychological profile, but I was standing on the street and watched the second plane make contact, but rather than panic or try to do something, I went back inside to the dining hall to eat pancakes before I went to class).

NYU cancelled classes for the rest of that week and lower Manhattan was shut down south of 14th Street for at least two weeks, so for awhile it felt like we were living in an alternate dimension. Keep in mind that there were bomb scares at Rockefeller Center, Grand Central Station, Madison Square Garden, and the New York Times’ offices in the weeks following the first attack, so there was the constant suggestion that it wasn’t over and that we could die at any time. I think I slept about three hours a night—not necessarily out of fear but because my adrenal glands were pumping all the time. I think other people had the same sort of experience—it seems like everybody I knew (myself included) drank less during those weeks because we felt high all the time. I did smoke a ton of American Spirits, but that’s only because I needed something to do.

But here’s the thing that I miss the most, and the thing that stirs up strong feelings of crippling nostalgia and guilt: terror sex. A lot was written about the fact that there were a shitload of babies conceived in the weeks following 9/11, and many have also suggested that the Sex and the City-style one-night-stand lifestyle was heartily boosted by the fact that people thought they could die tomorrow (I suppose people were having babies for the same reason; it all depends on your tax bracket). But terror sex was something different. A lot of people I talked to hooked up during that time because they had essentially gone numb to everything else, and sex was the only way to feel anything (like that scene in High Fidelity where they fuck in the car during the funeral). That was part of it, but there was also a certain rawness that everybody seemed to feel in the wake of brushing up so close to mass murder. I think that’s the only time in my life where I really knew what it was to be human in a purely animal, anatomical sense. Even though we only made love a handful of times, I remember every detail about Libby, who was from San Francisco and had taken a year off after high school to work before coming east; I later found out that the reason she did that was because she got pregnant and was going to keep the baby, only to miscarry. She had no ass, kept her pubic hair trimmed in a very peculiar and asymmetrical way and always smelled like mangoes even though she chain-smoked Marlboro Lights. My other partner from that era was a girl I went to high school with. She was a year behind me and I didn’t know her that well, but she ended up at NYU and we ended up hooking up a few times. Her name was Sarah and she was allergic to gluten. I have no idea what happened to either of these women; it seems like when the fear wore off and we got back to the business of going to college in New York, everybody drifted back to their lives.

I feel guilty about this whole scenario for a number of reasons. I feel horrible that I have admitted to myself that Libby was the best sex I’ve ever had, even though I adore my current girlfriend and know that we’ll marry and have kids someday. Somehow, it feels like cheating retroactively. I feel extremely guilty that I feel nostalgic for an event that resulted in the deaths of thousands of people. But there was something about that rush of fear that I know I’ll never capture again, and that makes me feel sad and relieved at the same time. ❤

Kyle Anderson is the author of Accidental Revolution: The Story of Grunge (St. Martin’s Griffin). He lives in Brooklyn.