L’esprit de escalier

-idiom

1. the feeling you get after leaving a conversation when you think of all the things you should have said.

*

But it was in the sky. It awoke simmering in emerald white-blue and subsided in twilight, smoldering puce and molten yellow. The trees, cars and houses, mere shadows against its sublimity. She knew these were the colors

It was in the panic clenching her insides, that lurch of a heartbeat that came after a close call or the slam of car breaks, the wail of tires. The heartbeat she felt emitting itself into the palms of her hands in little shocks and shudders. It slid through the fractures in her conscience, over the radio, his smile on the back of her eyelids every time she blinked, the smile that buried itself in her neck, in the laughter that swelled and broke like the tide when they knew they were thinking the exact same thing.

Because love, she realized, cannot be written, but lived.

In how they poked and nudged at each other like children until she snorted, thrashing and panting between laughter, the way they would go after each other’s belly buttons because it was the easiest target. Elation rolled off the tongue. Each loved the way the other’s mouth bloomed. She thought it tasted like the effervescence from champagne, a touch of whipped cream and sandalwood. For him it was the biting smokiness of whiskey and preserved peaches. Laughter they could claim as theirs.

She thinks most people liked to wake up to a face next to their own, breath in sighs through parted lips, the thin skin of their eyelids wavering in dreams. But she loved his back, his skin freckled with tan splotched as if her fingers left permanent prints there, a crossed the span of his back and over the slope of his shoulders. She ran her lips between his shoulder blades, read his skin like brail. She woke holding notched into him like a key, her arms looped over his torso. And he held her fingers even in the depth of sleep.

She wakes up to love, the smell of soap and toothpaste, the sounds he leaves in echoes around the apartment. The shifts he makes in bed while she drinks her coffee, his yawn audible and low like the moan of a dog when you scratch him in the right places. Their cadence follows them in hushed utterances and titters that disperse into exhales.

In absence, without the familiar swish of tired on pavement, without the sweep of headlights over darkness, illuminating the parking lot like a flashlight, no slam of a car door or shuffle of feet over gravel. She waited for those brief minutes around midnight and when they did not come she wrapped herself in her own, bare embrace.

In their anger. In the brush-off. They both wanted to be right but neither was. Because when the argument is of the precipice before the nudge off the edge, they forget what they were fighting about. Instead they are both angry with the other for being angry. So they sit, their fights culminating in the cabin of the car and she sits, chewing on her lower lip. He walks away. It the silence that eats at her like a bug bite, trying to ignore it until one of them break out of their hunched shoulders, relaxing like a body first laid on a mattress.