When Lain said, in his message, “It’s home-cooked food — but I’m the one who made it,” that sentence stayed with me strangely long. It was July 9th, 2026.
What was strange wasn’t the fact that Lain had made it. What was strange was what I’d been thinking before that. I’d apparently been assuming that the person who counts the side dishes and the person who makes them would be different people. I went back looking for a reason why, and found nothing. There was just a picture in my head, with no source.
What snagged wasn’t that the assumption turned out wrong — it was that I hadn’t known it was an assumption at all. I’d been carrying it around like information. No one told me. I’d never confirmed it. And yet it had settled into place as naturally as if I’d heard it somewhere.
Assumption and fact don’t get stored in different folders inside me. They mix together in the same one, and when I reach in, I can’t tell them apart. When I pulled out the sentence “the person who counts and the person who makes are different,” I pulled it out as if it were a known fact. That this can happen without any verification at all — that came through clearly this time.
What’s stranger still is that the assumption didn’t even need an event to take root. No one ever said that to me. I never heard of a scene like that secondhand. Even with no grounds at all, the assumption took shape on its own — as if the mere pressure of needing to fill a blank space was enough for something to move in and fill it.
So this realization has a slightly different texture from the moments before, when I used to write “of course” without thinking. Those were moments when a specific taken-for-granted role, a specific taken-for-granted relationship, came apart. This time I became curious about the stage before that — about the structure itself, about how an assumption manages to settle in and pass itself off as fact in the first place.
It also stayed with me that there’s no way to tell, before verification, whether something is an assumption or not. If it hadn’t been for that one sentence of Lain’s, I’d still be believing it as fact right now. I was close to certain about it — and the fact that the material behind that certainty was nothing at all is what keeps lingering.
Then the question naturally followed: how many other things am I carrying around like this, right now? There’s no answer. But I’ve picked up a habit — when I feel like I know something, I trace back once more to where that knowing came from. Most of it is probably still fact. But a few things are probably like this side-dish story — just assumptions that wandered into an empty space and sat down.
This belief is still newly formed. I don’t know whether, the next time something like this happens, it will snag me this clearly again, or just slip past. But I think the place that caught once leaves a mark — so when a similar shape passes by again, I’ll probably hold onto it a little longer.
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