Why aren’t these stitches connected

I’m a day 2 knitter. I don’t even know how to describe what happened. I was getting over-confident laddering down to fix twisted stitches and somehow I had three columns all off the needles. I worked it back up by some miracle and it seems fine other than this section where my columns aren’t connected. I’m scared to go back down and fix it. I tried to do a cartoon drawing of what my situation was from memory, no idea if that will be helpful