One Story Among Many

Diary Entry — Night Before

April 25, 2025

Tomorrow, it finally happens.

I’ve spent months walking these halls, memorizing patrols, cameras, schedules, watching the museum tell a story I don’t recognize. They hang portraits like Jackson’s and call it history, but it’s not just the past. His way of thinking never left. The same policies of exclusion, the same worship of power, just dressed up in different words.

I was nineteen when everything changed. My parents were detained at work, picked up at the warehouse they’d been at for a decade. No warnings, no chance to say goodbye. They weren’t criminals. They were just immigrants.

Under the Trump administration, it wasn’t just immigration raids. Funding cuts came fast and hard. SNAP benefits slashed. Housing assistance programs gutted. Health care access stripped away from families like mine. I lost my tuition support the same year. My world shrank overnight.

Meanwhile, people walked these marble halls, smiling in front of paintings that celebrate men who built systems just like the one tearing us apart.

That’s why tomorrow matters. Not for revenge. Not for profit. For the silence that needs to be broken.

At 2:16 PM, the staged emergency at the Temple of Dendur will pull security away. I’ll stay behind, overseeing the "evacuation" upstairs. The cameras will loop for two minutes, just enough time. I’ll swap out the Jackson portrait for the replica we prepared. The real one will be hidden in a custodial cart and rolled out through the loading dock.

By the time they realize anything’s missing, we’ll be long gone.

No demands. No public claims. Just an empty frame, and a space that finally speaks louder than the lies hung around it.

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