In the Mexico where I grew up —which is not the Mexico that exists now— tenement courtyards were shared spaces where you could hear the life of others without truly knowing it. Family is understood; neighbors are interpreted. You know your brother because you’ve seen him break, cry, grow, fail. But the neighbor is only a silhouette behind a curtain, a voice behind a door, a shadow across the hallway. The stories we believe about others are not made of truth, but of everything we don’t know.
Two university students lived there: one studying medicine, the other engineering. Thin, hopeful, with the future racing ahead in their heads but lagging behind in their pockets. They slept little, ate less, and dreamed too much. Big ambitions in a small room —the hardest degree of all.
One morning the medical student forgot his coat and several books. He called from campus in a hurry:
—Can you bring them?
—Yeah brother, I’m going.
His roommate gathered both sets of notebooks, pressed time against his chest, and to free his hands slipped the white coat over his shoulders.
He hurried down the stairs. Crossed the courtyard. Didn’t think twice.
And someone saw him.
A neighbor —a man who spent his days caring for his sick mother. A man whose routine was now measured in weak breaths and lukewarm tea. Some nights he watched her chest rise just to make sure it still did. He lived between faith and fear.
When he saw the young man wearing the coat, carrying books, his mind assembled meaning:
coat = knowledge
books = preparation
youth = future doctor
He didn’t know his name.
He didn’t know his story.
But he believed he knew.
And belief, when lacking understanding, feels like truth.
Days passed.
His mother worsened.
One cold night her body stopped responding.
She was barely breathing —almost not at all.
The son panicked.
Called an ambulance.
—Twenty minutes, they said.
Twenty minutes is death when someone you love is slipping away in your arms.
He remembered the young man.
He remembered the coat.
He remembered what he thought he saw.
He ran through the hallway, down the stairs, and pounded desperately on the door.
The student opened, stunned by the force, the panic.
—Help me! My mother is dying!
The young man froze, not knowing where to place his hands or his fear.
—How? What do I do? Me? —he stammered, lost.
—You know what to do! You’re a trainee! Do something!
—Trainee? What? I thought you were looking for my roommate. He’s with friends studying for the final, I thought—
Words collided like blind bodies in a narrow corridor.
The neighbor believed he was speaking to a medical intern.
The student believed the man was looking for someone else.
The third was gone.
Reality evaporated under assumptions.
No one lied.
No one pretended.
No one had the full truth.
The ambulance arrived. Fast voices, firm hands, a stretcher cutting through air.
The woman left wrapped in a thin sheet.
The son trembled —broken.
The young man remained in the doorway, with the coat now not on his back but weighted in his memory like guilt without origin.
The courtyard returned to its usual sound —but everything had changed.
One truth had been carved into silence:
Belief replaces knowledge when knowledge is absent.
We believe what comforts us,
interpret what we want,
invent what we’re afraid to lose.
Belief is judgment built on appearance.
When we don’t know, we imagine.
When we don’t understand, we fill the gaps.
When we observe without knowing, we fabricate identity.
Belief is fast, fragile.
Understanding is slow, solid.
Belief creates mirages.
Understanding reveals reality.
From that story we step into love —and Sabines appears
Years later, with that memory matured inside me, I read one of my favorite poems —I Hope to Cure Myself of You— and felt it speaking directly to that scene in the courtyard. Because the gap between believing and understanding is the same gap that Sabines exposes between believing we love and truly loving.
To believe we love is to see the coat:
symbol, projection, need, salvation.
To love without adjectives
is to see the person, naked of expectation.
And Sabines, with gentle brutality, writes:
I hope to cure myself of you in a few days.
I should stop smoking you, drinking you, thinking you.
I prescribe myself time, abstinence, solitude.
He bargains with himself:
Is it okay if I only love you for a week?
It’s not much, nor little —it’s enough.
A week to gather every love word ever spoken,
burn them,
and warm his hands in the bonfire of charred affection.
Because the best love words are exchanged
by two people who say nothing to each other.
He even recognizes the code lovers speak:
“It’s hot outside.”
“Could I get some water?”
“It’s getting dark.”
Ordinary phrases meaning I love you beneath their surface.
He asks for one more week:
One more week to gather all the love of all time.
To give it to you.
So you can keep it, caress it, throw it away.
Not to force love to stay,
but to understand it
and release it.
For this is like leaving the madhouse
only to enter the graveyard.
Because to stop believing is painful,
but to understand is liberation.
Belief is fiction.
Understanding is truth.
Real love has no coat.
No projections.
No illusions.
Only clarity.
Closing
If you have never read Sabines, if you have never read I Hope to Cure Myself of You, do it now.
Turn the world off.
Breathe.
Drink poetry slowly.
After reading Sabines,
the world becomes a better place to live in.
I say this not because I believe it —
but because I know it.
Deja un comentario