Samantha Torres ’28 has a way of preserving beautiful things. Ticket stubs and photobooth strips paper the walls of her dorm room, carefully curated and arranged like Degas paintings on the walls of an art gallery. We spent our first Friday nights of college together on her top bunk watching movies, our feet dangling over her collection of memories.
We’d watch episodes of “Sharp Objects” and “Girls” on HBO, snacking on freeze-dried blueberries and talking about little flashes of our past lives. She’d tell me about her scavenging trips through the Silverlake Flea Market, her summer exploits in Italy and her internship as a Getty Museum gallery guide. We’d grown up in the same town, her in the hills and I by the coast, and had learned to savor our pasts in the same way.
She collects her memories like flowers. She presses and dries them between the pages of her journal: screenshots of conversations, portraits of past crushes, timelines of arguments and ghostings and poems about the past flutter from the pages like petals. She fills her phone with photos to look back on, to reminisce and remind herself of past joys. Sam’s personal Instagram account is barren and devoid of posts, but carefully collected photos flood her secret account, privy only to the most sacred few. There she preserves the things she finds most beautiful: her friends, the ocean, crowded market stalls in Italy. Fresh fruit, playing cards, chess pieces. Lipstick kisses, lace curtains, colored glass bottles. Vanilla ice cream dripping down my fingers in the heat of the summer before we left for the East Coast.
We first spoke over Instagram before making our coastal trek. Sam had sent me a message:
“Hey!! I think our moms were talking on Facebook (crying emoji) and I saw your post on
the 2028 page! We’re so alike it’s scary…”
Sam was right — about our mothers and our kinship. We were both fixated on Ottessa Moshfegh’s grimy prose, Fiona Apple’s poetic, punchy lyricism and our meticulous catalog of memories.
We both ran through our lives like children catching fireflies. I scribbled down all my brightest, flickering thoughts, capturing the memories in the ballpoint of my pen, but Sam was different.
In the crush of a swirling dance floor, when your eyes flick away to the ceiling or the strobing lights, Sam captures you. She’s quick and silent, snapping candids with a sly ease. She’ll catch you in her lens when you shine the most, when you’re neon and luminous like the painted stars in Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” She inspires you to be better, to glow brighter and to see yourself in the same luminous way that she sees you.
We all put on our grown-up costumes for her 19th birthday. Turtleneck sweaters, sleek black dress slacks and scarves made up our play-pretend attire. We ordered appetizers like grown-ups would — herb-roasted edamame and mushroom dumplings — before I broke our play-pretend game. I started the happy birthday song, much to Sam’s embarrassment, and then asked Sam to tell me about her vision for her future, one I believe to be near-prophetic. In ten years time, she’ll be a museum curator in New York City. She’ll curate artwork from Aya Takano and Xi Pan, arranging paintings of big-eyed girls and rosy-cheeked women like she arranges the photos of her closest friends. I told her I’d be there, wearing my grown-up outfit, cheering her on. I probably won’t look much like the boy she features on her secret account, grinning and glowing under a New Haven streetlight, but I’ll be as proud of her as I am now.
A part of me will always be preserved in Sam’s first gallery. She’s caught me in her amber: laughing in her photo dumps, spilling vanilla ice cream down my tanned hands and dancing just slightly out of frame. I hope that in these words I’ve preserved a little piece of her too.