Today, I thought about how half of America is caught in a winter storm right now, besieged by extreme cold, ice, and snow while the desert along my road looks almost the same as it did when the October sun set over the hills. I thought about the differences in time and space between these places.
Einstein told us space and time are relative, that movement dictates how time passes. We know that astronauts orbiting Earth age slower than people on the ground and that if I move faster than you, time will pass differently for me. But that’s the scientific aspect of time and space.
I was thinking more about the human side of time and space. How time feels different depending on circumstance. How being deep into a project causes time to almost vanish, but waiting makes time feel tense and stretched. And love. Love can collapse distance and time depending on circumstance and relationship.
But most of all, I thought about Alex Pretti and Renee Good and the chaos in cities where men are grabbing people off the street and daughters who are scared for their fathers who came to America when they were only young men. And I looked at the desert — a different time, a different space.
I walked in that desert and felt calm solitude, felt as if the only thing that existed was freedom. At the same time others were being ripped from their lives. Terror and tranquility — different times, different spaces. How arbitrary each of those things are for each of us.
There is no resolution to that dissonance. Only the sharp reality of two very different spaces existing within the same time feeling like two incompatible worlds. I felt angry and grateful and helpless and angry again.
America, January 2026, is a time I never thought I would see. America, January 2026, is a grief I never thought I would feel.