I hate this week.

Every year for eight years now I have hated this week. PTSD rears its ugly head. I have bad dreams about planes, and fire, and the smell of jet fuel and the uncensored press room feed soundtrack of bodies hitting the ground.

Eight years. An eternity and a heartbeat and the reality is somewhere in between. There is so much life that has happened between now and then that I don't even know how to articulate the difference. 302,952,960 more heartbeats than they got. Give or take a few.

I realized earlier that a high school freshman was in first grade when the towers fell, when the hole blossomed in the heart of the Pentagon, when how we viewed the world changed. I wonder if they can possibly fathom what it was like before, what they take for granted after. I kind of hate that. I want to shake them and talk about what it meant, to taste ash, to sit and wait for word, to watch as that great big flag stretched like a bandage across the charred remains of a building and how I had to look at it every day and remember.

I want to cry for how little has actually changed, for false and fake patriotism used to disguise real acts of terror, perversions of justice and the desecration of our Constitution and I'm scared that's all still going on. That we still provide bombs to allies in faraway lands that are stamped "Made in the USA" and kill mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and breed new generations of people for whom the United States is the worst of four letter words. I can't even be mad at them, when we make their martyrs.

8 years. 416 weeks. 2,920 days. 70,080 hours. 4,204,800 minutes. 302,952,960 heartbeats. I still remember, because I don't have the luxury of being able to forget.