Waiting For January 20th

(4-minute read)

Time is different lately and I’m not a big fan.

Now feels like it’s before. The near future, that is everything on and after this coming January 20th, feels like it will last forever.

The medium future has gone from my mind entirely, though it seems like a lot of people still have it. It’s past Thanksgiving of course and it gets dark outside at 4:30, which doesn’t help. Seven o’clock looks like midnight.

And it gets dark inside randomly: When I open my eyes up an hour before my alarm remembering what happened, or is happening, or will happen. For a minute or two it’s like I’m waking up into a dream. Sometimes it gets dark in the late morning, when the sun is out: As I take a sip of coffee and work through my emails the world is okay, at least as okay as it ever was, and by the next sip of coffee the world is a balloon, and all the air has gone out of it, and I can barely read my emails. This can last for hours. Or minutes.

I noticed time going by in weird ways weeks before the election even. Every individual day of this Fall was just too much. I’d read something on The New York Times and before I was even done I’d refresh the page to see if there was anything new to know in the forty-three seconds since I’d started knowing the first thing. I would download Threads, an Elon-free Twitter knockoff I could feel good about, and scroll until my eyes ached. I couldn’t wait for the next second. There was hope in each one. After fifteen jagged, non-consecutive minutes I’d realize that I was in too deep, I could not sustain this tempo of attention, and I would delete Threads from my phone. An hour later I’d download it again.

Sometime in there I saw a post or a tweet or a thread or whatever you call them that said something like this: Election Day is like the event horizon of a black hole. I’m being pulled closer and closer to it, but no matter how close I get I can’t see what’s on the other side of it.

I think I passed some version of that insight off as my own in many conversations before November 6th.

I remember talking with a friend and saying that I couldn’t wait for this election to end, that I just wanted it to be over already, but also that I wanted everything to stop, that I didn’t even want to finish the sentence I was speaking, because then we’d be that much closer to close of polls in Michigan and Pennsylvania and as long as the voting hadn’t ended, then anything was possible and nothing bad had really happened. Not yet. Those few months shook constantly. My brain was a plane that never landed but just circled and circled and circled through unannounced turbulence, night and day.

Now I’m on the other side of the event horizon, in the black hole, and crossing that line doesn’t seem to have helped at all: I still can’t see what’s around me in a way that I can make sense of it. Now I’m just looking at the nothing from the other side, and maybe I’m upside down. It’s hard to tell.

I’m anxious but in a different way. The minutes and hours and days are bobbing past me in the current at their usual, orderly speed. But I’m not in motion. I’m not writing postcards to voters. I’m not writing letters. I’m not calling inactive voters in North Carolina and interrupting them in the middle of their days. I’m not frantically searching the margins of school board races in Oklahoma looking for the dimming afterimages of silver linings. I’m not doing many of the things that made up my 2024. Reading the news feels like lifting an absurdly heavy weight over my head, and spooning vomit back into my mouth, simultaneously.

I remember hearing somewhere that according to scientists time, at its most fundamental level, is simply change. We know that time exists because things change. Life moves. The sun is here and then it’s there. Air comes into the lungs and then it leaves. An atom is at Point A. Then it’s at Point B. Point A and Point B are separated by distance. But also time. If all the atoms just stayed where they were and never moved, it wouldn’t be clear whether time existed or not.

And that’s the thing, isn’t it?

Something changed, something that seems like everything. We re-elected Donald Trump. The hurricane of chaos that is taking shape in the waters off Point A is entirely known to us, but its speed and its strength and its path to Point B, wherever that is, are not. In the meantime Joe Biden is still president, still nodding along, and there’s still small talk about Christmas.

It’s too late to do anything about what’s coming. It’s far too late to do anything about the billions of negligences, both tiny and incomprehensibly large, that got us to the point where Donald Trump seemed like a good idea. But it’s too early to respond, too early to plan the protests. It’s too early to know if protesting of any sort works anymore, or if it’s just one of those dead remote controls you keep in a basket in the basement, the ones that don’t work even if you change the batteries. (It’s possible you threw out the TV they were connected to.) And if protesting doesn’t work anymore, which it would seem it wouldn’t, it’s far too early to know what might.

So I have some time on my hands until January 20th. Just what I didn’t want, more time: Dry, itchy time.

My hope, and it is hope - hope that feels more solid than it sounds - is this:

As long as time is passing, that means the atoms are moving. If the atoms are moving, then things are changing. And if things I can’t see and don’t really understand are changing, then there is at least the slight possibility that this invisible changing might be toward the better.