That morning, the girls in my dorm pulled me into their room to watch the events unfold on television, and I realized how lucky I was to be an outsider still.
I grew up on Lake Dunmore in Salisbury and graduated high school in 2001. I moved to New York City for my freshman year of college exactly two weeks before September 11th. That morning, the girls in my dorm pulled me into their room to watch the events unfold on television, and I realized how lucky I was to be an outsider still. Everyone around me was in tears, panicking, because they were all from New York or New Jersey, and they knew people who lived downtown or had family members who worked in the towers. I hadn't even been to see the World Trade Center yet. I’d barely left campus. But I knew for a fact that everyone I loved was far away and safe. My loneliness, my disconnection, I was grateful for it. It took a day for the smoke to travel uptown and about that long for me to get a call out to my parents because the phone lines were a mess. By then the bridges were closed down. And that was the thing that bothered my dad the most. “Even if I wanted to come get you and bring you home I can't. I can't get to you right now,” He said. Everything was still so uncertain. And until that moment it hadn't even occurred to me that I was stuck in Manhattan. Anyway, I stayed at school, obviously. And during my sophomore year, I took a work study job with the Columbia oral history research office, a job I continued for the rest of my undergrad. They were in the midst of a big 9/11 project where they interviewed over 400 survivors of the attacks, from first responders to witnesses on the street. And they continued to interview them over the course of a few years to explore the impact of trauma over time. For three years, my job was to listen to hundreds of hours of interview tape and proof it against the transcripts that came in. And I vividly remember so many of those firsthand stories I heard. In fact, when I think of Sept. 11 it’s their stories I remember much more than my own.
Tori Preston
