I'm not confusing anything. I was merely stating what General Relativity tells us in precise mathematical terms: Time passes between the event of something happening and the event when light/information from that first event first reaches us (or could theoretically reach us). This is reflected by a delta in the time coordinates of the involved events.

> Things happen at the earliest possible moment I could know about them.

You're of course free to define the word "happen" this way but among physicists you'd be the only one in doing so.