What We Remember

And what we refuse to let be rewritten.

By Taylor Allyn

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An empty chair. A folded flag. And the ghost of a salute. Some absences speak louder than any speech. Illustration by Taylor Allyn. © 2025. All rights reserved. This image is protected intellectual property and may not be used, reproduced, or distributed without explicit written permission from the artist. Approval required for any reposting, publication, or derivative use.

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May 26, 2025

We do not honor the dead by dishonoring the living.
We do not mark graves with grievance.
We do not turn sacrifice into a soundbite.

Memorial Day is not a stage—it is a threshold.
A quiet, unrelenting line between noise and memory, between performance and principle.

Some use the flag to shroud their shame.
Others carry it because they bled for it.
And still—some were never allowed to carry it at all.

Because not all sacrifice is seen.
Not all courage is celebrated.
And not all who died for this country got to live in it fully.

So today, we remember the ones who didn’t come home.
And the ones who came back invisible.
And the ones who were buried twice—once in war, and again in silence.

We remember them without distortion.
Without scapegoats.
Without the violent theater of men who mistake microphones for morality.

True patriotism does not scream.
It listens.
It mourns.
It builds what it did not inherit.

To the fallen, the forgotten, and the forcibly erased—
We see you.
We carry you.
We will not let you become a prop in someone else’s delusion.

Let that be enough—for now.

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