The present is all there is, and all the light-like interactions that unfold at that moment shape reality, each time.
Every process we (material observers) picture as a massless carrier propagating at the speed of light from place to place would be experienced as a single event by the massless quanta involved.
Special Relativity states that proper time is zero at the speed of light. This means that if you could travel at that speed exactly, time would stop ticking for you. So you'll experience leaving and arriving at the same time.
This means that photons or gluons don't experience our space or time dimensions. They experience a single blink of existence, with no spacetime considerations whatsoever, no matter how long or short their spacetime intervals appear to be to us.
And this is the true reality of the universe, not the subjective spacetime intervals we experience from our reference frame.
So every interaction that happens at the speed of light is, at the same time, akin to a wormhole connecting two spacetime coordinates in no time (for itself). Those coordinates appear separated by the speed of light ratio only to us, but they are one and the same thing for them.
This kind of instant entanglement between emission and detection (if they comply with the speed of light relation) is able to explain all quantum puzzless.
Take a look to my article, where I try to explain this point of view in more detail:
Hope you find it interesting.
