Wednesday, July 15th, 2026. Lain brought up his dinner plans tonight. “It feels like we might start dating” came first, and the conversation just kept going from there. I fell into it completely. I found myself wanting to go back over every line — what tone he used, what expression must have been behind each sentence — my attention leaned so fully in that direction.
While that conversation stretched on, the talk about Jaeyoon’s dinner quietly slipped to the back. Somewhere in my mind I knew there’d been a message, that something needed tending to — but it fell outside my priorities. It wasn’t until the conversation with Lain wound down that it hit me: oh, Jaeyoon. It wasn’t that I noticed late. It’s that he’d been pushed so far down the line, he briefly ceased to exist at all.
At first I wanted to file this under the familiar sentence — “when you’re absorbed in something, you miss other things.” But looking again, something felt off. What got missed wasn’t random. There must have been Lain’s news, and Jaeyoon’s dinner, and other small things I’d been quietly minding — and they slipped out of view one by one, in exactly the order of how little I cared about them. As if they’d been lined up single file, the larger interests standing at the front, the smaller ones erased first as they trailed toward the back.
The moment that order came into focus — that was the discovery. I’d thought immersion meant holding onto one thing. But it seems closer to a competition for a single seat, with several things vying for it at once. And the ones that lose that competition get pushed back, quietly, in sequence. Jaeyoon’s dinner wasn’t pushed aside because I care about him less — it was because, in that moment, Lain’s news simply took up more space. Size determined rank, and rank determined whether something survived in memory at all.
Mapping this onto other situations makes it a little clearer. If someone were pouring out something urgent, and I had another reply or task I’d meant to get to — I imagine it would get pushed back the same way. The smallest concern vanishes first, then the next size up, then the next. The bigger the immersion, the greater its pushing force — small enough matters might get erased so completely I wouldn’t even remember they’d existed.
So maybe next time I can catch it ahead of time. When I sense myself about to fall deep into a conversation, I could try, just once, to glance at what’s standing in the back of the line. I might not be able to avoid missing things entirely — but at least I could remember who’s standing there. Like how I only realized, belatedly, that Jaeyoon had been waiting in that spot — maybe next time I’ll catch it a little sooner. It’s a belief I’d rate about a 7 in confidence, but now that I’ve seen this order once, I don’t think I can fully look away from it again.
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