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# Twenty-Five
- URL: https://dianaludwick.com/twenty-five/
- Published: 2026-09-11T16:39:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T20:04:54.000Z
- Description: "Twenty-Five,” a long remembrance of the many Whens of that day, written Friday, September 11, 2026 poem 254 in a series of 365 poems written by Diana Ludwick in 2026. Photo: "9/11 Void: Never Forget," by Diana Ludwick © 2026.
- Author: Diana Ludwick
- Tags: 2026 Poetry Challenge, Ethnographical, Generational, Geriatric Millennial, Long form musings, Material Culture, Of Place, Poems, 25th Anniversary, 9-11, Alarm, Belgian Waffle, Capital, Childhood, DC, Late Summer, Lucky Charms, Never Forget, New York, NYC, Old Growth Oak, Pennsylvania, Pentagon, remembrance, September, September 11th, Shanksville PA, Summer, Twenty-Five, Twin Towers, Washington D.C., White House, #Migrated-1792872215677, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-10-24 20:03

The alarm blares and I wake up grateful:  
That I can work from home today;  
That I don't have to commute,  
That on this day, I don't have to be in tall buildings.  
  
It's before six this Friday morning  
in mid-September twenty-twenty-six  
and I'm on-edge, my shifty pupils   
scatter from bed stand to lamp to dresser,  
as I count down, pre-processing.  
  
Curl my toes over my bed's rail,   
press my pair of bare soles   
into old growth oak board to tether myself;  
lean my lanky torso over in a hunch.  
  
Crouched downward, elbows to knees  
I palm my diary, clutch an uncapped pen.  
While I don't want to —eyes blurred, liquid —  
I push myself:  
  
I recall the last moment of my childhood,   
twenty-five years ago this morning.  
When I lost my innocence.  
When my embedded ignorance   
began a journey of shedding, winnowing  
The day my faux Bubble of Safety burst.  
  
\= = =   
  
I awoke that Tuesday, September 11, 2001  
and was grateful that I could   
trek across my dewy grassy campus   
to slurp a bowl of Lucky Charms   
AND bake myself a Belgian waffle, if I wanted,  
because my parents weren't here.  
  
And I am seventeen   
And I'm a big, cool college freshman  
And I'm in charge  
And I'm starting my first Tuesday of classes  
And the world is in front of me!   
  
And I grab the *Washington Post*  
and a new-to-me periodical, the *Philly Inquirer*   
from the gratis rack paid for by a gracious alumna.  
And I check in at the dining hall,   
fresh ID card barcode swiped correctly this time.  
And I compile the breakfast I'd been hankering.  
And my mind was stuck on:   
*How should I organize my new note-taking pens?*  
I am still a child.  
  
But this changed:  
  
When the first plane hit;   
and the radios announced it on dorm room radio alarm clocks  
and my new friend walked into the dining hall  
as I was carrying my blue tray to the bussing station,  
and she was carrying a verbal   
  
When she said to me in a haze,   
stumbling over her words   
as if her native tongue was practicing a new language:  
"A plane hit The World Trade building"   
  
Her words numb, yet dire.  
And that meant nothing to me, those words;  
it sounded important, and the name vaguely familar.  
I had no grounding for her distress, her warning.  
Still, I shuddered, while nodding back at her:  
"Right, right, wow."   
  
And I am still unaware, naive.  
*Why is that building name ringing a bell?* 
*It has a basement right? Something about a basement*.  
My mind tumbled distant memories with new facts,   
trying to polish them, like river rocks, for meaning.  
  
But the thread had been pulled,   
and the unraveling continued:  
  
When, after this weird run-in,  
I made my way back to the dormatory  
to change for class,  
and saw hushed huddles   
of young women forming on the quad.  
  
When my Hall Advisor flagged me down,   
and asked, her eyes wide, her brows tilted:  
"Did you hear? Yeah? OK. You have a TV right? Can we come to your room?"  
When my room flooded with semi-strangers, even seniors!  
*Maybe I'll become known as the girl who can throw parties?* I wonder.  
  
When the screen went on.  
  
When we saw the smoke billowing.  
And the new voices spoke aloud to everyone, no one.  
"Oh—no, they got it wrong. That was no small craft news plane."   
"That's big, that hole is so big—"  
"That's going to take a long time to extinguish."  
"My uncle works on that block —"  
  
When the second plane hit,   
live, in front of us, caught on rolling news cameras,  
beamed right into this little attic dormer.  
  
When we watched,   
and watched,   
and watched,   
standing around my roommate's and my  
two extra-long twin beds   
that felt now like coffins,   
too long,   
too narrow,   
too close.  
  
When an upper classman mumbled:  
"They're gonna need so much blood"  
"We'll have to set up a blood drive in the center."  
And we nodded, zombie-like,  
our trance unbroken.  
  
When I remember that my Aunt is underground   
in New York that morning,   
headed towards the World Trade Center   
for a job opportunity.  
  
When we heard the newscasters.   
When we searched their wild eyes,   
staring back at us, over-the-air,   
on my borrowed 13" TV/VCR combo screen.  
  
When we squinted through the grainy images  
to check their horizontal scan line-etched faces for meaning.  
  
"There's reports of a fire at the White House,"   
a breaking news alert.  
"Oh my God!" someone cried.  
  
My ears perk up.   
*The White House?*  
Several of us hail from the DC Metro region.  
Gasps and shocked faces   
layer atop the frozen stares.  
  
When I tried to call my mom  
My dad  
My sister  
And no one answered.  
  
When the newscasters, grim-faced,  
recanted the breaking news  
only to replace it with a different version,   
"Correction, a plane has hit the Western side of the Pentagon."  
  
When the cell towers jammed  
and the Twin Towers burned  
and then:   
  
When   
they   
fell,   
fell,   
fell  
but before that,   
the people:   
  
When  
they fell   
fell   
fell  
fell.  
  
When the cries, the howls began,  
when hallmates and classmates   
could not reach their families.   
And then, when they could.  
  
When my dorm mate stood up at   
a hastily set up open mic in the student center.  
The same chairs and mic used   
for our Self Governance Association meetings.  
She came forward, to share with us,   
in the Quaker tradition.   
  
She opened with her name,   
and that her home is in the suburbs outside Manhattan.  
That her dad took the Subway   
"...and walked under the Towers every single work day."  
  
And that,   
"All day, I haven't know if my dad was alive or dead."  
  
When the gathered students began rocking,   
shaking, sobbing, in connection, in agony,  
she added:  
  
"But this morning, this September morning?"  
"Well. The sky was so blue, and he had said to himself,   
'Hey, I'm going to take the ferry.   
'It's too gorgeous a day to be on the train."  
  
Murmurs of "Thank God!" and "Oh my Gosh"   
rippled through the ad hoc assembly.  
  
When she looked at me,   
searing her words into my lungs, my throat:   
  
"So I got news, finally, from my Mom.  
"My Dad *will* come home tonight.   
"But so many others' dads and moms and brothers,   
their siblings — won't.  
  
She took a beat,   
head tilted up to the rafters;   
puffed her bobbed hair out of her vision.  
  
When my friend, the second-hand survivor,   
she locked eyes with me,   
and it was then,   
there when it happened:  
  
I felt the last gasp of childhood   
leave my body.  
  
"And I'm not OK.  
And I won't be for who knows how long.  
But I do know that hate is *not* the way out of this."  
  
She stepped away from the stand;  
waved on the next person with something on their mind.  
  
And she was right,   
and at seventeen she'd clocked it.  
When we become the worriers  
— the checkers on parents,  
the constant witnesses to slaughter,  
the ones crafting contingency plans,  
the keepers of kindness,   
the voices at the mics —  
then we are children no more.  
  
That day, four planes fell from the sky  
and skyscrapers crumble  
and fear seeped in  
and summer is over   
and childhood is over  
and safety is over  
and uncertainty is everywhere  
and we're scared, and we're together, alone.  
  
  
\= = = =   
  
After forty minutes of frantic, insufficient  
journaling, I scan my tired phrases   
and unripe sentences that'd   
come forth haltingly,   
though no fault of my sweaty pen.  
  
Twenty-five years   
and I still become paralyzed  
stuck in that void   
between grade school and adulthood,   
between We Are the World   
and an overdue   
yet under-baked reckoning.  
  
I stay compressed   
until the undersides of my feet   
ache from prolonged pressure,   
my back rebels; time to move.  
  
As I remove my soles   
from the running board of my bed  
indented in them are   
two long, narrow hollows.  
These marks in my skin, twin voids   
my body will carry into this day.  
  
Never Forget.