Buy Or Don’t Buy

In the fall of my junior year, I lived with a Macedonian exchange student named Orhan. He was a pleasant enough fellow, except that he was homesick and so spent all hours of the day Skyping in Macedonian. I soon grew used to this, and learned to treat garbled Macedonian as just another ambient noise to drift off to.

But one day Orhan paused his Skyping and started playing music. It was beautiful music, French music, and though I could never remember any of the words or the melody or anything else about it when I woke up, I knew that it was my favorite music to fall asleep to.

I finally asked Orhan about it. “Carla Bruni,” he said. Carla Bruni at this time had not yet been plucked out of obscurity to become the first lady of France and was just another anonymous singer/heiress/supermodel. The song Orhan loved, “Quelqu’un m’a dit,” quickly became one of my secret favorite songs; so secret, in fact, that the two of us were seemingly the only ones in the country who knew it. Even though I knew we weren’t really, there’s something to be said for feeling like you own something.

But it was not to last. I saw 500 Days of Summer last night, and found “Quelqu’un m’a dit” underscoring a quiet, romantic scene — the type of scene it was made to be played under. My secret favorite song is in a big indie movie and all the hipsters are going to love it. But instead of getting mad or possessive (it’s only a song), I’m going to release it out into the world. Here it is: