About a who loves it when she feels like.

The girl said she wasn’t writing to him for any particular reason. Something about his self-introduction (which was only a hundred words long) made her feel they’d get along. He trembled as he read this, then spent three hours composing a reply, deleting as much as he wrote. From here on, they began a rapid exchange of messages. Each morning, he’d wake to find an e-mail from her—neither long nor short, perhaps five hundred words, mostly responding to his queries from the night before and adding to whatever they’d been talking about, plus displaying an appropriate level of curiosity about him. There was nothing special about her word choices, and sometimes she’d make grammatical mistakes even he could detect, but she had a warm intelligence that wasn’t in the least threatening. All in all, she seemed a perfectly normal girl with an average education. He’d read each message three to five times before heading off to the restaurant, where he’d fumble over and over for all of his work hours because his mind was completely occupied with composing his letter to her. After his shift ended, he’d rush home to send off a thousand words that had cost him an entire day’s errors at work and then the long wait till the next morning. This wasn’t a pleasant sort of anticipation, but he had several hundred reasons for not suggesting other means of communication. As to why he should find himself so hooked on her after only a month, it wasn’t only because he didn’t know a single other woman outside his family; rather, to him, she represented absolute perfection. By ‘perfection,’ he didn’t mean anything like long hair or big eyes or a slender figure, though, of course, he did have his image of the ideal look: petite, pale-skinned, soft as vanilla ice cream. But the most important thing was the internal drama accumulated after so many years of loneliness. For instance, she mentioned she adored celery, red grapes, fish, and beans, but didn’t much care for meat or shrimp, which meant if they were to eat together they could clean each other’s plates; she enjoyed after-midnight browsing at 24-hour supermarkets, picking up each item to examine it carefully before putting it back; she’d rather watch a DVD at home than go to the cinema (though she’d never rent one of those art-house films that went straight to DVD); she was an only child, she’d hated handicraft classes as a little girl, she frequently looked up at the sky as she walked along the street, she spoke too much when she was nervous, she caught colds easily, she dealt with stress by nursing little jealousies, she tried a different soft drink on each visit to the convenience store… Her daily note might have consisted largely of idle chatter, but it also revealed more and more details like interaction and personal hygiene so bad the restaurant manager had to frequently speak to him about it—but nothing could hurt him anymore. When he encountered a beautiful female customer, his hands would shake (when word of this got out, many of the ladies who worked nearby flocked to the restaurant to test if they were attractive enough to provoke a tremor). Each night his dreams centred on turning into a completely different person. He entered his details into a dating site but waited three hundred and five days before receiving his first message. The girl said she wasn’t writing to him for any particular reason. Something about his self-introduction (which was only a hundred words long) made her feel they’d get along. He trembled as he read this, then spent three hours composing a reply, deleting as much as he wrote. From here on, they began a rapid exchange of messages. Each morning, he’d wake to find an e-mail from her—neither long nor short, perhaps five hundred words, mostly responding to his queries from the night before and adding to whatever they’d been talking about, plus displaying an appropriate level of curiosity about him. There was nothing special about her word choices, and sometimes she’d make grammatical mistakes even he could detect, but she had a warm intelligence that wasn’t in the least threatening. All in all, she seemed a perfectly normal girl with an average education. He’d read each message three to five times before heading off to the restaurant, where he’d fumble over and over for all of his work hours because his mind was completely occupied with composing his letter to her. After his shift ended, he’d rush home to send off a thousand words that had cost him an entire day’s errors at work and then the long wait till the next morning. This wasn’t a pleasant sort of anticipation, but he had several hundred reasons for not suggesting other means of communication. As to why he should find himself so hooked on her after only a month, it wasn’t only because he didn’t know a single other woman outside his family; rather, to him, she represented absolute perfection. By ‘perfection,’ he didn’t mean anything like long hair or big eyes.