This was Ha, born June 9, 1975 in Rach Gia, Vietnam, and immigrated to the United States in 1980. She was divorced and lived alone in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Over the next month or so Ha and I would be messaging or chatting every night, making each other laugh and trying to out-think the other. She was building a huge website and put most of our chats on it because they were quite entertaining. We'd ad-lib Star Trek episodes, which were pretty funny, or trade song lyrics for hours, and when we ran out we made up our own. I rarely went anywhere because I was always trying to study for promotion, and it got dark early, so while I studied in the dark with my computer on, I chatted with Ha. I was mentally exhausted during January from all this. On January 14th, I was feeling sad about my divorce, so Ha showed me how to use Powwow, a voice-chat program. We talked for three
hours, got tired, then doodled on an interactive chalkboard.
Ha liked poetry so I tried dabbling into that a little. I'd written a silly Christmas poem for my old office a month earlier, a violent parody of
"The Night Before Christmas" called "The Night Before Christmas"