I am not a woman of faith (because my father was not a man of faith) but even I must admit that in our modern world of rationality and science (which I inherit as a scholar of science) that despite the high-brow atheism and intellectual detachment (fed upon by a population of cynics), there are still so many open spaces for God, to appear, to sit, to greet then shun then forgive, (a liquid which fills and undulates at will in the chasms of the unknown), including but not limited to:

• the time before there was time in this universe
   
• the ear receiving my pleas when the wine hits the carpet
   
• the gap between is and ought, can and will
   
• the silence of the overnight ward before dawn
   
• the source of suffering and purpose, which are not the same
   
• the rings within trees that remember the kind years
   
• the reason to believe in reason but also the evidence not to

and lately and most importantly, the mere seventy to eighty steps between my door and yours, the distance that separated us, as neighbors then friends then lovers, a space that must contain at least a droplet of God because how else could I have ended up so close to a man of such merciful tongue?