Say it Twice

Growing up the doctors often described it as being a short-circuit, as if Greggory Willen's brain was more similar to a malfunctioning computer than a complex organ. Sometimes he was able to keep it inside, stifle the words that threatened to flow out like a breaking dam, but most of the time they spilled out despite his best efforts. It was a repetition, one sentence followed by an identical one, almost as if his brain didn't register him saying it the first time.

Mr. and Mrs. Willen first noticed the speech anomaly when Greggory was six years old, during an unfortunate incident in which Greggory couldn't stop repeating the rather nasty insult that he heard his father spit out while driving. At first, it seemed like a childish habit, something to be grown out of like sucking on a thumb or pacifier. That belief quickly fizzled out like a wet match when Greggory began repeating anything and everything he would say, from asking for another helping of potatoes twice, to repeatedly saying hello to any strangers that they might pass by.

Greggory was taken to his first doctor three days before his seventh birthday. He was a slender child with coke-bottle glasses and a gap between his two front teeth that he had a habit of probing with the tip of his tongue when he was not trying to repeat himself. It was in that first office when his mother and father were told that Greggory's brain was like a computer with soda spilled on its keyboard, or an eight-track with a deep groove scratched into it.

In grade school, Greggory had been nicknamed "Two Times" by a group of particularly cruel boys not known for their combined intellect. Despite his professed nonchalance, the name still haunted him whenever he was faced with a word or sentence that he couldn't keep himself from saying again. Phantom mocking stutters or howling laughter would fill his ears till the day he chose to clamp his mouth shut and remain that way unless it was absolutely necessary.

Greggory Willen couldn't help but like repetition in his adult life. His daily routine was written in black pen on a piece of butcher's paper tacked to the south wall of his apartment. Each bullet-point and daily task was specific and timestamped in a neat orderly script. Each morning would start the same, wake at 6:00 a.m. sharp, make his bed, then walk to the bathroom to read aloud the rhymes on paper that the last doctor had given him to practice with.

"Roses are red and violets are blue, blue," the last word he would whisper beneath his breath, "and sometimes they sparkle with dew, dew," the word would quickly slip out, unwanted. In the beginning, Greggory would have scowled darkly at the mistake, but now he only shrugged. Perhaps he would always be Two Times, perhaps one day he would think that that wasn't such a terrible thing after all.

Greggory Willen had met Sally Duluth on April 17th, on the first day of his new job in the mailroom at the law office of Fosters and Sons. She had burst into the room, red-faced and out of breath as she begged for someone to look for an outgoing letter in a blue envelope. It was a mistake, she had explained, an envelope put in the wrong pile that must not be sent out under any circumstances.

Greggory remembered thinking that he had never felt such warmth flood his face as it did when Sally Duluth looked him in the eye and anxiously stuttered out that the contents of the letter were related to an open case and would most certainly result in the loss of her job should it be opened by the wrong person.

When Greggory had spied the corner of a robin's egg blue envelope peeking out in a pile of outgoing mail, he had nearly leaped for it in excitement. Handing it over to Sally Duluth he had felt like a knight bestowing a gift to his lady retrieved from a distant exotic land, the smile that spread across her face was brighter than any sunrise he had ever seen.

Sally Duluth wasn't known for socializing or being talkative, instead, she kept herself sequestered to her corner office on the second floor, head bent over the papers spilled across her crowded desk. Greggory thought this to be understandable, seeing as how he too liked to eat alone, keeping to his desk in the far corner of the mailroom.

After working up the courage a few days later, Greggory had walked up the stairs to the second floor and gently knocked on Sally's office door, his heart pounding in time and his hands growing sweaty till he had to wipe them on his pants. Greggory had grown out of the coke bottle glasses of his youth, rather they were round frames that perched on his nose and had the habit of sliding down his nose when he got excited or nervous. If he was ever nervous it was in that moment, standing outside of Sally Duluth's corner office. But Sally didn't laugh when he asked her out, and then proceeded to ask her out again, instead, she smiled and said yes, much to Greggory's surprise and relief. A nervous smile was slowly spreading across his face as he ducked under the doorframe as he hurriedly backed out of the room.

Their first date was in Sally's corner office on a Thursday evening a week later after everyone else had gone home. Greggory had proven to be meticulously organized and had filed each of Sally's sprawl of papers into neatly labeled manila file folders. They ate miniature peanut butter sandwiches that Greggory had bought from the vending machine in the hallway, and drank cold coffee that Sally had retrieved from the coffee maker in the lounge room.

Eating in comfortable silence, they had both had been surprised at how at ease they felt with one another. They were as different as they could be. Greggory was tall and slender like a reed, while Sally was short with comfortable curves. Greggory kept his smiles confined to a small twitch in the corner of his mouth while Sally smiled as open and easily as she breathed. They were like a pair of mismatched socks, as the others at the law office of Fosters and Sons called them.

But Greggory Willen loved Sally Duluth with all of his heart because she listened twice as much as anyone else, and Sally Duluth loved Greggory Willen with all of her being because he always told her that he loved her twice.