A light laugh pearled from her mouth.

This is the only way I can describe it, I swear to you if I could say it differently, I would. I hate figures of speech just as much as you do, probably even more. But this woman was different, her poise and elegance not to be matched with anyone else I’ve ever seen since then. There is no other way to describe her laugh as ‘pearling from her mouth’, sweet cadences of a river softly whispering, of champagne running out of a glass bottle, of rocks skipping on the water’s surface. Her laugh was all that and more, a sound so strange and lovely that I could never quite forget it, even long after she’d married another man, even long after I’d married someone else. It’s pathetic really, that I still try to define that one sound, something that I should have forgotten over the course of time, over the different lovers occupying my mind and soul, the different lives I’ve lived. But I guess there are some people – undoubtedly there are some people – whom you will never quite forget. They might not even be especially good, or especially bad. They might just have come to meet you halfway at a time of your life where you needed someone to walk the way with you for a while. And after having left them at the next forking of the path, you will still sometimes turn around and smile at them, maybe even give a little wave until they are no longer visible from around the bend.
And then, with time, you’ll forget what their noses looked like when they were cold, and you’ll forget that one word they would always use in the wrong context, and you’ll forget their favourite poetess, and you’ll forget what it felt like to love them and eventually, you will even forget the sound of their laugh.

Not with her.
I still remember, after all these years.