"The Evergreen, Everlasting Christmas"

It's 1997.
A wreath of Christmas lights encircles your dorm room ceiling yearlong
I'm lying on my back on your twin bed,
studying you at your desk typing at the computer
Blasting down unknown players lurking in shadows
in a multi-player video game "Doom" between your problem sets,
Your copper hair glistens like a gleaming ornament amidst the lights
Outside, the December white winter snow descends upon the Charles
The whirl of cars sliding sluggishly through
the slushy Storrow Drive punctuate the hours
A chill fringes the windows, I look out at the barren branches and
the white walls of the MIT President's grand home
A festival of psychedelic spring flowers in fluorescent greens and fuschia cheerily adorns the wall before me—
A framed 1980s poster print of a painting you borrowed
The sweet scent of herbal weeds mingles in with
your last Stouffers tv dinner of mac and cheese
Empty plates of crumbs piles nearby the bed
A black-framed Ando Hiroshige's c.1855 woodblock print of
"Navaro Rapids" rests on your pale wooden bureau
A flat box lying on your clothes mountains features
a festive looking house illustration filled with windows of chocolate —
Windows framed by crinkled aluminum foil curtains opened reveal
daily event Cadbury milk chocolates partially eaten
Your mum in UK has mailed me one this year as well,
our first Christmas together.
I faithfully observe the rules, eating only one per day, delighted
You, who have been receiving chocolates for years,
carelessly breaks the rules and take two today.
Every chocolate representing the march of days
looking forward to Christmas.
The room is dim, I stare at the ragged nondescript,
mousey, brown-grey carpet beholding
another green-wired string of Christmas lights flickering,
you far away beyond arm's reach.
This moment feels familiar.

It's 2005.
Exhausted at 3:30 am from another Christmas night
working at the restaurant, my holiday family duties.
The faint scent of oil-drenched fried chicken wings and
chicken fingers lingers on my sweater,
I plop down by the computer in my brother's room,
deciding last minute to check my emails
Expecting a deluge of holiday greetings from well-wishers —
A headline catches my eye, "A sad new about Ben Walter."
I open all the other emails first, my heart sinking.
I note the "s" missing from the word news.
I stare at the period at the end of that email subject header.
Seems so final.
I click. A rapid of words flood fast...
"Died suddenly. Body found. Ben Walter. Shanghai. December 21.
Our good friend. Gone."
I scream. My brother doesn't understand, asks me to lower my voice. He's embarrassed.
I think of the last three emails he wrote on his last couple days to which
he thought I didn't respond. I replied too late. Two days too late.
I think of the last AIM message — the one I paused as I decided whether I should save that message.
I closed the window reluctantly, thinking there would be others.
I ponder what I was doing that day earlier in the week.
December 21. Freelance web design. A day just like most.
It's been 5 years since I've last seen you.
I was in Shanghai in the spring for a day earlier this year —
You were too ill to meet up, you wrote.
You have another college friend in town staying with you.
You have a venture capital meeting in the morning.
The taxi ride is too far away.
Over an hour, you protested. Too expensive.
Rivers apart, I'm by the Pudong, and you at the Puxi.
This moment feels familiar.

It's 2007.
I'm looking out the window on my right, it's a blur of white through my red and transparent swirled curtains.
Snow has melted into a soggy slush.
I suddenly remember I saved that Cadbury chocolate event calendar box somewhere in my closet,
A tribute to a Christmas I once looked forward to carelessly.
Wreaths of Christmas lights now encircle my common rooms downstairs year-round
Christmas lights crown every apartment since yours
Your Ando Hiroshige's woodblock print now rests
on my light wood bureau.
Your b-day card depicting a chubby coppery orange striped cat arms outstretched and wearing a British patrol hat leans up against this print. Card reads, "Happy Birthday! Or as they say in England...
Happy Birthday. We speak the same language."
A b-day card. A valentine's day card. A Xmas card.
Old cards to mark the new chapters of my life line my room.
Only you're not here to say it.
This moment feels familiar.


by
Janet Si-Ming Lee
Principal Designer, Siming Cybercreative
December 15, 2007

Idiosyncracies of an Effervescent Spring Longing in the Time of Autumn

A sea of black Chinese characters float below
Pastel and pyschedelic animated murals, phantoms of a
sugar-coated alternate universe spun in childhood fantasies
Pixieish, wide-eyed Yuki croons to an effervescent, bubble-gum
sky blossoming of cotton-candy pinks, golds and lime greens
Lithe-figured, sprite-like, she ebulliently leaps and playfully dodges
between the foreground and background of painted scenes and mirages
The tv screen glows, a turquoise-blue gem within the night of day
You chant along in mandarin to this hypnotic pantomime,
your British accent and boyish tones become
an idiosyncrasy of times and places you've traveled and imagined
You swim between your dream states —
Mesmerized by everlasting spring bling in a world of dim shadows,
Enchanted by fantastical potentials, numb to a greying reality
Autumn lowers its eyes to an icy winter enfolding its steel-cold arms
around us outside, between us inside
Quietly, I turn to look at you as I leave.
You hardly notice, your eyes entombed by the screen
displaying another world that grows intensely vivid
This brew of electric blue and kaleidoscopic colors bedazzling
continue to spin and draw you in...
Your copper hair, smouldering embers lit by artificial lights
A lone hue among browns, beiges and the whites of your reality.
The dark closes around you, I close your door behind me.
Beyond the wall, my silenced spring, I hear —
Your immortally child-like voice serenading this digital dream,
It's another autumn setting...
Your song lingering...

by
Janet Si-Ming Lee
Principal Designer, Siming Cybercreative
November 1, 2007

50 Trees Sing Your Name... Remember You for Centuries: In Loving Memory of Ben Walter on his 29th b-day

Today would have been the 29th b-day of my dear best friend Ben Walter. I dedicate 50 trees through Oxfam gifts in his memory so that they can sing his name and remember him for centuries. Two peace books have also been dedicated in his honor as well in hopes that we can build a more peaceful world. Much love to you, dear brains.

- siming

Chance Meetings Defined by Random Chaos or Fate?

“I like chance meetings — life is full of them. Everyday, without realizing it, I pass people whom I should know. At this moment, in this cafe, we’re sitting next to strangers. Everyone will get up, leave, and go on their own way. And they’ll never meet again. And if they do, they won't realize that it's not for the first time.”
- Krzysztof Kieślowski (Director of Film Trilogy "Red", "White, "Blue")

To be familiar with Krzysztof Kieślowski's films is to recognize that this quote befits his approach toward filmmaking and story developments. A minor character in the backdrop of one film becomes the primary protagonists of the sequel.

I find this quote fascinating as I have wondered this as well. I wonder what our lives look like if we could zoom out and see the complex matrix of our interactions with others, the points when we intersect at junctures of street corners, classrooms and theatres. As strangers who think we have never met, we discover we shared the same space years ago at the same time. When we look at each other...perhaps we look familiar. Maybe we have been familiar. I recall being in high school (perhaps the summer of junior year?) and a classmate named Taylor made a rather perplexing comment as we waited for a bus. Someone made a comment that my hair had reddish highlights or silver highlights. Taylor, solemnly observed me and said I had silvery-shiny highlights. He then said he knew me pretty well or something like that. At that point, I said to him that I recall seeing him in our junior high school biology class where he sat at the first row closest to the door entrance, his red and black checkered jacket covering his head. He slept (or pretended to sleep) through all the lectures. I never spoke to him then I think but he was one of the amusing characters in that classroom aside from two girls who came in dressed as if they were pregnant, their backs arched over presumably by the weight of their poofy pillows tied to their bellies or more likely, by the weight of their imagination of a pregnancy. Taylor said quietly and dismissively of that fond bio classroom memory, "I know you much more than that." Hmmmm. Well, maybe in a past life.

I think of random coincidences... maybe they were fated and deliberate rather than the debris of chaos, part of a matrix of a determined future unbeknownst to us. Recently, I joined Facebook.com site and was surprised and bittersweetly delighted to see an email from the younger sister of my late best friend and former bf Ben Walter who happened to have searched for my name on Facebook that very day I signed up. I had wanted to look up Angharad's contact info through a friend of hers since her contact info was not on her site. What a strange and beautiful coincidence that she should have happened to think of searching for my name that very day I signed up.

I wonder about deja vu... is it possible that some people seem familiar to us because they are characters in our lives each time? Perhaps, those who experience deja vu more often re-experience their lives over and over, seeing the same characters again each time. However, for others who are living their lives currently for the first time, perhaps, they don't experience deja vu or a strange sense of familiarity with their existing lives. If we suppose this is true, why then are some of us destined to repeat the same struggles of our previous lives, treading through the same muddy paths, destined to make the same mistakes? Is there a lesson we're supposed to learn but keep missing each time? I like to imagine that perhaps at the moments of our deaths, we are offered two options... a new beginning or a chance to return to our past lives if that would be the only way to see our loved ones again. What if it took thousands of years to be reborn as ourselves or billions of years for the universe to return to this state where we could relive our lives? What if there are some of us who are aware of this cycle somehow in our subconscious and the deep-seated loneliness we may feel stems from the bittersweet recognition that our time is but one quick instance in the billions of years it will take to return and see the ones we love again? Would it not be bittersweet and lovely then to see the face of our loved ones and to re-experience perfect moments with them only to know that it would take millions of years to return to that same moment? What if I've been a lonely nebula floating in the ocean of time, in the womb of the universe waiting to be reborn but alone all this time...

If we could zoom out to witness and map the paths and crossings of our lives like spectators observing our context to our contemporaries, what would the map of our lives look like? Do our paths and interconnections repeat every hundred of years in the paths of our ancestors? Presumably, the world we live in is experienced as smaller to us even as our life footprints span a greater distance. We can travel to further places than our ancestors did in a lifetime. However, could our travels mirror the movements and distances of our ancestors in their clans at their micro-level? I often contemplated when I was in college whether human interactions mirror molecular interactions. Could friendships, relationships, and larger group networks be described in terms such as covalent bonding, ionic bonding, etc?


- Janet Si-Ming Lee
Principal Designer, Siming Cybercreative

In Search of the Everlasting Perennial?

A small, round glass bowl of orchids
Rests on my square, kitchen table
Delicate, pale pinks crown this simple glass —
Yet their petals are firm, crisp, and young
The unbroken idealist.
The light of a cloudy Sunday afternoon
Illuminates the ribboned lines that spill from dotted centers
The drizzle-beaded bay window
Framed by a pseudo-tropical view of a lush ivy and spider plants adorn the fringes of my window view
Overlooking
Outside, a garden of winter weeds
A square patch of brown, barren earth lie unpopulated with greens
The lawn stoicly waits for a sullen summer.
Oh, spring orchids, so perfectly formed and hopeful
Today.
But what of tomorrow?
I've seen your brothers and sisters wilted and browned,
Your mothers and fathers stooped by age and cynicism
Once beautiful like you are today
Bittersweetly, I look upon your frail beauty and resolute pride
and recognize your fragility
But what of the child
Who sees her first orchid?
Or her first flower?
Was love purely hopeful and non-melancholic once?
Were we too young to remember what it felt like then?
And now too old to forget the loss, we pine for memories
we never lived and never knew?
Should we aspire for a childlike naivete unspoiled by regrets and
long-lived experience?
Or walk a tight-rope life, tottering between tentative hopes and
absolute losses, burdened by the knowledge of life's transience?
Can there be a flower that never dies?
Or must we make do with the perennials that expire
And are reborn anew —
But not the same?
Oh, the sun has broken through the grey clouds!
Can the disappointed hope once again be renewed?


by
Janet Si-Ming Lee
Principal Designer, Siming Cybercreative
May 20, 2007

An homage to "u"

A poem I wrote last summer 2006 when I took a typography design (the study of letterforms and the role of typefaces in communication and information hierarchy development) class at MassArt. This is an homage to typography in memory of my dear best friend Ben Walter (munch 2):

"An Homage to U"

Sorrow sleeps in the nooks of the serifs
Hollow loneliness echoes long around the counters
I'm a letter in black sheep —
in a word out of context
Grouped in with other letters;
A phrase seeking meaning
A floating non-sentence in a nonsensical world.
I kearn myselfcloser to my neighbors only to find them —
Shifting     away, forming new interletter spaces;
Gaps   of   misunderstandings
Someone removes a letter — u —
Beside me, close to me...now gone.
Lonely. I'm aware we're now a mispelled word.
Perhaps, I need a new arrangement... maybe meet new neighbors.
It's all been a scramble of mispelled letters since you've been gone.
Hoping this will all make sense someday.


by
Janet Si-Ming Lee
Principal Designer, Siming Cybercreative
Summer 2006

Another Winter Sinks In — Reflections on A Year After Ben

Today is officially the anniversary of my dear best friend Munch2's (Ben Walter) death. Well, perhaps it was yesterday, December 20th since today was yesterday in Shanghai, China where he passed on. The present is already the past elsewhere. I never thought about how the day of a person's death is not a universal day in the universal moment experienced by all on this planet. For example, Martin Luther King's death date varies across the globe although the actual time is a universal moment.

I thought often as the days rolled closer to today or yesterday, what I could have done to prevent this tragic direction. Could I have been nicer to him during our college years? Could that have changed the course of our future? Our fate? Throughout this year, I kept thinking that on that particular day, munch2 would still have been alive. However as of yesterday or today, time has folded into himself... an entire year will emerge soon that starts the years where I cannot reflect on how just a mere year ago, he would have been alive.

I learned during this one year the human capactiy to float above the darkness. As humans, we always seek to find a plateau in our suffering. Like ocean waves, the water falls yet rises again in constant flow. However, I also recognize that there are some losses that define a person and this one touched the most beautiful places of my heart. As humans who have truly loved someone or something, we carry these wounds, these scars that leave us different, indifferent, tougher, softer and more sympathetic to the suffering of other that reveal a heart that can feel for others. Munch2's passing and the death of several others around this time has led me to reflect that what makes us human is universal.

Munch2 could have done so much for the world... I can only do my best to make his legacy and beauty live on elsewhere.
This year, I offered gifts from Oxfam Unwrapped in memory of my dear munch2: 12 textbooks for children and training for teachers in a poor region of the world. Hopefully the love I felt in my most profound friendship can blossom somewhere else and that his life is recycled elsewhere in the hopes of others renewed.

Much love to you, dear Brains... always.

- siming
www.jsiming.com
December 21, 2006

Six Months Past and Counting

I loved to look into your childlike eyes
Large, dark, sympathetic pools
Sinking into their silent caramel brown depths, I felt
An everlasting liquid longing
A heart-churning, desperate, unrequited
love like a misty, jade-green summer pining for its lost spring
With the delicate, pink blossoms long gone, spring seems like a dusty dream
My love, I cannot resist
Your unfathomable, enchanting gaze
my heart sunk
to the bottom of our endless loneliness
I drowned in the ocean of your melancholy
I tasted the salt of unseen, unbled tears
I gazed into my mortality, your mortality
Transfixed, I glimpsed your eternity in my emptiness
Baby, perhaps I knew even then...
Our moments together would be a mere --
instant in my new decades alone.
I long to look into your childlike eyes
again...


by
Janet Si-Ming Lee
June 26, 2006 (Monday)
In loving memory of my dear best friend Munch (ben walter)

Evolving Recollections... Can a contemporary evolving love outlive the temporal context?

I was recently reflecting on love evolving with time as our recollections of our past relationships evolve over the years...
As I contemplated on the sad reality that my dear best friend Munch2 (ben walter) died tragically at the young age of 27 in December, I realized that although I am still his contemporary as of now and think of him as my contemporary, what happens when I'm 60 someday, will I still think of him as my peer, my contemporary?

Can a contemporary love retain its temporal contexts if people step outside their relationship to time? If parents lose a child, I think their relationship to their child is still relatively the same in their evolving memories especially as we consider that parents often think of their grown children as being perpetually much younger even if the parents should be their 80s and the children in their 60s. However, what can we say of a friendship defined by a contemporary generational context? If someone dies as a grown adult defined by a stable concept of self-- if such a thing exists-- perhaps the contemporal relationship can exist between the dead and the living assuming that the other living individual's identity is also at a constant, stable state. However, in my opinion, Munch2 was still at the brink of true adulthood... a peaceful plateau of self-actualization and I can say at this point, I am at a similar stage. We were ephemeral contemporaries in our self-actualization and our generational experiences although I think that in true love, there exists a knowledge and recognition of the eternal core of one another's unalterable personalities, motivational drivers, and potential. If I feel that I can predict the achievements he would have obtained later in life and the evolution of his thinking given his extraordinarily gifted talents, interests, personality and temporal contexts, can my love and memories evolve to contain him in my temporal contexts?

Can I contemporize a temporal, ephemeral relationship where one individual continues to grow but the other is at a static stage? Or would there be a day when I'm in my 80s, that I would think of him as a grandmother fondly looking back at him suspended in time as a young adult forever young and beautiful, a rosebud frozen by a premature winter? Or will I look back and see him as I once did when I was in my 20s because our relationship is a temporal experience? When I'm with my family, I often find myself slipping back into the shell of my former self... my relationship contexts mostly remain the same. Of course, there are major events in life like going away to college and living away from home afterwards that have altered my relationship and some perceptions. Given that we can often slip back to our former relationships within old, non-relevant contexts, perhaps, it's possible that I will never think of him from a grandmother perspective on a much younger individual but rather as my contemporary as we once were in our shared temporal existence. Since munch2 was a couple years younger, I will always think of him as younger and his death doesn't change that. I occasionally wondered after my paternal grandfather passed away how his wife, my grandmother thought of her then older husband? My paternal grandfather was just a few years older than my grandmother but he died ten years ago when he was in his late 70s...now my grandmother is in her mid 80s, does she think of her husband as "older" than she still or younger now?

Poem: Pepperminted winter mist lingers

peppermint oil frosted winters
bottled in purple tinted glass
acid burnt suede after midnight
sculptures of metal sprawled out
rolling mercury across the floor
we fumbled for a mercurial moment
sunday afternoons by a bench
at the charles river watching the sunset
counting hours silently before a
dreaded working monday begins
embracing each other tightly
we were an island together
stranded in a strange universe
your face, a picture of innocence
pale below a stoic cap of copper brilliance
a porcelain child i wanted to protect
eyes wide as a baby stare up into white space
heavy with loneliness and pain
teetering between empty giddy giggles
and silence and eyes shut
your eyes were always blank those days
a wall i could not touch, enter
i was lost in your suffering
tiptoeing on a dorm's rooftop
we watched the 4th of july fireworks
a Chinese-born American, a Brit
sharing an American experience
gulping down little bottles of booze
with two other friends
summers simmered forever
a delicate blend of melancholy beauty
laugher echoed across the years
wish i could go back
and save you
love burns like acid
nothing but fuzzy memories
textures of dreams left
writing to your screen name
a face grey and unlit now
i pretend you'll write back
a knock on IM after midnight
you're halfway across the world
a day away in time
you should be up now
i could almost think
it's you
no--
but you're gone.

by Janet Si-Ming Lee, March 23, 2006

The March of Spring, a winter season has passed...

Yesterday was the first day of spring. An entire winter season has passed since Munch2's passing on the first day of winter December 21st. Time marches quickly... March will soon slip into April. The days are not quite distinctly warmer -- it has been a warmer winter to begin with. The sky is still gray.

The Chinese have memorial days on the two equinoxes of the year where they visit the cemetery to pay their respects to their loved ones and have a picnic above their graves. My family held theirs on Sunday at the Forrest Hill Cemetery where my paternal grandfather Yung Chak Lee is located. It's nice that asians keep the dead in their lives, their ancestors in their minds. Typically we bring lots of Chinese dimsum and pastries, pork with crispy skins and sit and eat there. There are often many Chinese families there in the spring and fall as well visiting the grave sites of their loved ones. It's funny that even in the afterlife, there are still ethnic communities clustered together... a little Chinatown community for the dead.

It would be strange and sad to visit Munch2's grave in England some day... just a name on a stone and know that somewhere below, he sleeps forever under winter snows and all the seasons of the years. I haven't seen him since 2001 when he graduated... five years ago. I had hoped i would see him alive again. I think of a quote that I read somewhere as a child... "If we knew when and where would be the last time we would see a loved one again, our partings would be more dear" or something like that. The last time I remember saying goodbye to Munch2, we were on Main Street near Kendall Square MIT area. We held hands and I cried thinking when would be the last time I would see him again. I held his hands in my hands wet with tears for as long as I could while thinking of that quote. He seemed rather antsy, eager to start the next stage of his life that left this Cambridge behind. I watched him for as long as I could still see him... his bright copper hair fading into a dot around the bend and underneath the aisle of trees. Maybe there was another goodbye afterwards where I last touched him but this goodbye I remember best. I thought then maybe I'll see again in five years? Who knows? I didn't know for sure that moment would be the last time.

The crocuses should be out soon... I'll have to keep my eyes open for the signs of spring...

From Dust to Pixel Dust... our pixelmatter lives on in cyberspace...

I was contemplating today on that old phrase "from ashes to ashes, from dust to dust"... currently, with the growth of websites that house information even from the mid 1990s, it's strange to think that our pixelmatter may live on in cyberspace long after we do physically. From dust to pixel dust... fragments of our old selves live on on other sites and if anyone continues to add information or commentaries to postings, there is a new generation of ideas and sentiments that continue to thrive long after we're gone.


I googled the web for any previous postings by my dear Munch2 and found his previous postings as long ago as 1995 when he was just a 15 year old pioneer of the web and a photo of him (see photo on the left) in a Kidlink class. It's so precious and bittersweet to see his photo then and hear his youthful idealistic voice again in these postings on kidlink:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Subject: File: "KIDART PXBENWAL"

|=|----------------|=|
|=| THE KIDLINK |=|
|=| PHOTO EXCHANGE |=|
|=| PROJECT |=|
|=|----------------|=|
|=| Coordinated by |=|
|=| Ben Walter |=|
||
|=|----------------|=|


1) Who am I?
My name is Ben Walter, and i'm 15. I live in the outer reaches
of civilization in Cambridge, England ;-> I love music,
reading, computers and going to see movies. I'm a DeadHead
(or as close as you can get to one stuck over here :->); that
is I love the Grateful Dead. I'm about 6ft tall, and I love
wearing brightly-coloured tye-dye shirts. I guess typical
clothes for me are jeans and a t-shirt (tye-dyed of course!)
with the odd silk head-band thrown in for effect :-> No
60s retrospectives here folks! *grin*



2) What do I want to be when I grow up?
I'm not entirely sure what I want to be. I certainly want to
carry on working on the Net; I love the Net and all those on it.
I'd think to carry on working the KidLink community and help
it to expand. I'm really entranced with the whole idea of
a global community of kids. It's the sort of thing most
people are only dreaming of, but it's happening now and
we're a part of it!


3) How do I want the world to be better when I grow up?
I would like to see people learn to understand each other
more. I would like to see people treat each other as they
would treat themselves, and realise that they aren't alone.
I'd love for people to understand different ways of thinking,
and learn to respect them rather than ridicule or criticize
them.


4) What can I do now to make this happen?
I think that the KIDS project is working on this right now. It's
getting Kids all around the world working together and learning
about each other. There is a big difference between learning
that there are however-many-million people living in, for
example, Russia, and talking to a russian child, learning about
how they see the situation. It makes people see how events around
the world affect real people. For example in the recent uprising
in Moscow I knew people who actually were in the city at the time.
It wasn't just a crowd of blank faces, hell, my friend could have
got hurt..


//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\ > ben@tsunami.demon.co.uk <
\ bjw@gnu.ai.mit.edu
In the land of the night \ ben.walter@lambada.oit.unc.edu
the ship of the sun is drawn by The Grateful Dead. \//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

As I am copying this message and including his old photo... I have dispersed his pixeldust into the web world for the duration of this site and his kidlink site. One never knows how long one's words will last online. Online sites converge into one in mergers and acquisitions... sites go out of business... new website redesigns replace old pages. I discovered that munch2's website "bwalter.org" is probably going to be down someday. I thought of buying his domain and so that I never see it replaced by someone else's information. instead, I could pay a tribute to him on that site. If more people comment on these messages and his words proliferate, he lives on in the pixeldust, his words echo forever in cyberspace.

There's so much beauty in him that I see again when I read this message -- all that idealism I saw when he was passionately engaged in mudding in the first day of the MIT class we took together so long ago. Hmmm... 6 feet tall-- I never knew he was that tall and never knew he loved tie-dyed shirts although I can imagine that he did as a hippie visionary of the X generation. Or is that the Y generation? I believe the Y generation starts in 1978.

2nd month anniversary

I looked at the date today... February 21, 2006... the second month anniversary of my dear munch2's death date. Strange to think that just two months ago and a day or two, he wrote me his last email the day before he passed away. A farewell email -- only that he didn't know it was a farewell email. If he did, what would he have said? Fortunately it was an email that was so sweet and summarized our best friendship and affections. He thanked me for the "best present he had ever received" -- a collage of photos arranged artfully with poetic memories of our college years named "metamorphosis" after our college project. it was my graduation present to him when he finished his studies at MIT, top of his class. I wrote back to him two days too late. I guess my collage of poetry for "metamorphosis" would be my last farewell words to him as well.

He wrote:
+++++++++++++++
Nuts,

Just to let you know that I arrived back in Shanghai this morning. Before I left, I was admiring the beautiful present of the collage of images and words of our time together at Wellesley and MIT. It's such a beautiful thing - easily the best present I have ever received in my life, and I really cannot imagine anybody being able to do anything more caring, so thank you again for those exquisitive memories - that I would love to have a copy of the content it was authored with to burn to a CD and save with my most valuable documents. Do you still have the .PSD file (or equivalent, if it was not Photoshop), so I can have everything kept with me?

On the flight here I watched a Japanese film called "Trainman". It is supposed to be a true story of how a terribly geeky Japanese nerd picks up the courage to stop a drunk harassing a beautifug lady and the emerging story of how a painfully shy nerd transforms himself with help and encouragement from a diverse group of Internet addicts who also are transformed from teachers to students themselves. It's a very open film, focused really on exploring the hero's transformation. I'm sure you would love it too.

Love,

Brains

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Days become a month leading to yet another month that we parted ways. I think often of his sweet parents and how hard it must be for them. His photos still adorn my desk including his Christmas 1997 mousemat that his parents gave him that features a photo of him when he was 5 or so playing with his new toys... such a beautiful young face with his whole life before him. Who knew that it would only be 27 years? His photos that I took of him during our college years arranged in a collage also adorn my desk, smiling with all the innocence of a shy teen. He's looking at me in these photos when I took them. Are photos of loved ones silent, eternal dialogues with the ones who took them and if so, do these photos and moments then truly belong to us? I think of the 1980 movie "Somewhere in Time", a story of soulmates stuck in different times -- lovestruck Chicago playwright Richard Collier (Christopher Reeves) falls in love with a vintage photo of a beautiful young Elise McKenna (played by Jane Seymour). He later undergoes self-hypnosis to go back in time to meet this young actress. You find out later that the photo he fell in love with was taken when he went back in time and she smiled at him. Do these dialogues remain even when we are nothing but the textures of dusty dreams and faded memories?

In loving memory of munch2, my best friend: Benjamin John Walter (1978-2005)

I lost my dear best friend of over eight years -- Benjamin J. Walter-- December 21, 2005 very suddenly. I think of him everyday. If one's love can be quantified and correlated to the number of pet names one has for another... he had at least 25. My favorite being "munch2" -- short for munchkin, a pet name that he gained when he did this cute imitation of the munchkins from the Wizard of Oz -- "we're from the munchkin land, munchkin land, munchkin land..."

I remember the first time I met the Munch2 in '97 during my fall semester as a senior at Wellesley College (see Ben with the copper hair in the photo here at my graduation with my best gal pal Grace on the left). I tiptoed into my first MIT class "Communicating in Cyberspace" (a web design and communications class), sitting down at a computer to his right. I stared at the black computer screen, unsure how to log in. I looked over to my left and saw Munch2's radiant young, sweet, baby face with a brilliant copper crop of hair typing rapidly at the keyboard and grinning transfixed enthusiastically at his screen. I asked him what he was doing and he quickly replied "mudding"-- without looking away from his computer. I had no idea what that meant. I then timidly asked him if he could get me set up on my machine. He helped me and then returned to his computer. The following week after insisting that my best gal pal Grace Song join me in cross-registering at MIT for that class, I met up with Munch2 again. Both Grace and I picked him to be our project partner without knowing that the other did so as well. Munch2 became our project partner for a MBTI-based personality test web edutainment site called "Electronic Age Metamorphosis." It remains one of our favorite projects that stood the test of time, a project that I know that Munch2 was very proud of as well. Munch2 was a precocious sophomore, a student that even older MIT students in our class would turn to for solutions. He had a delightful British accent and his raw genius abilities deceived me into thinking he was a senior as well. I was always touched by the way Munch2 used to be turn to listen to us and his whole face and ears seemed to turn out in such an open and accepting way. He had a 5000 watt smile that was so genuine and charmingly innocent and the most radiant copper hair. Once when Grace and I fought on the project, Munch2 was the peacemaker, teaching us forgiveness.

I heard the devastating news on Xmas and have been heartbroken and stunned. Feels very unreal. He was one of my best friends ever since '97, inspiring and supportive especially after our years in college. We dated for 2.5 years, a true first love found only when the heart is open and idealistic still.

Munch2 had such a beautiful heart, a rare multi-talented brilliance that was clear even among the most intellectually gifted (e.g. 5.0/5.0 at MIT!), a passionate curiosity, ingenious nature, a child-like idealistic quality, and he always believed in people's potential for greatness. His gentle and witty sense of humor was charmingly delightful and creatively expressed in conversations and in his thoughtful emails. He inspired me to think entrepreneurially and supported me in my efforts for greater artistic achievements. He was my creative North Star who I turned to when I felt lost creatively or worthless and seeking the light of his kind encouragement and unconditional faith in my creative, intellectual and artistic potential. A mellow hippie with a poetic spirit, he introduced me to zen buddhism ideas, oranges, browns and neutral colors, peppermint oils, henna tattos, hemp beaded necklaces, baggy cargo pants with over six pockets, Moby's porcelain song and the Grateful dead, Christmas lights for room decorations year-round, and Pablo Neruda's poetry. He made terms like "psyched" seem cool. He was also a visionary genius imagining the future, someone who could challenge others to think bigger ideas, connect cyberspaces in novel ways. I admired him more than probably anyone else among my peers. He was the brightest constellation among my galaxy of friends... he had so much potential. He could make me cry and laugh at the same time.


(James Blunt song "One of the Brightest Stars" I like to dedicate to dear Ben here)

Munch2 lived an exciting life of adventures and travel... A lifetime of achievements in a short time especially in the last years although I always dreamed of watching him grow and reach his potential. I wanted to see his metamorphosis. I imagine that he would have written a couple novels of his adventures as an expat; taught at universities like his parents who are brilliant professors, consulted at top firms as a world-renown entrepreneur and thought leader; married later in life; had two children; fallen in love with more countries (munch2 was most recently enfatuated with China, previously with the US although originally from the UK); and contributed more to non-profits. We would have continued to collaborate on personal web-based art projects and professional consulting projects. We were sure to have resurrected our project "Metamorphosis" in flash with more complex animations and ideas, perhaps winning an industry design and technology award. Maybe we would have lived in Cambridge area again... we would have shared a lifetime of conversations and found ourselves at last. He was a pioneer and a beautiful, poetic artist of life... A timeless person for all the ages. As his parents or his friends said of him very poetically, "There is something meteoric about his life-dazzling, but fleeting" -- I agree... he lit the universe of my life like a streak of vivid orange light, a flash across the the dark and silent heavens. Alas, how swiftly the light passed yet how long we will marvel at his legacy, the inspiration of legends, a snapshot of our imaginations. I will miss him dearly.

Much love to you and happy cyberspacing, dear munch2.


- Janet Si-Ming Lee
Siming Cybercreative