One look into the eyes of the new generations immediately reveals nostalgia for times they never lived, yet they stride confidently ahead with their distinctive style, reinterpreting the past to shape the future. adidas Originals has chosen the iconic Gazelle sneakers to represent a generation that escapes standardisation. A generation that expresses individuality with a timeless design that will be with them every step of the way.

50 incredible things to do with your husband: it’s the Perfect Couple’s bucket list! Imagine you find “Leave him” at number one and then it’s a slippery slope of lawyers, assets, and blame games only to find that number 50 is: “Get back together”! (I swear these things happen). Maybe I’m exaggerating, but I’d take it over a pompous list of all the things I could do with my husband any day. If I ever have a husband. And if I do, I think we’d be in serious trouble if we needed bullet points instructing us on how we can feel, for just a moment, the thrill of existence. Bungee jumping. In a vain attempt to relax by scrolling, I ended up in my tagged photos. I looked, with a mixture of nostalgia and affection, at that odd and easy-going figure who I no longer see in the mirror when I look at myself today. I closed my eyes to better see the memory of that evening when the girl emerged from the strobe lights: Gazelles on her feet, decisive step. The curly hair that caressed her face swayed in time with the movement of a body that seemed annoyingly proportionate to me. It frightened me how much she affected me. I felt on the verge of falling into the unknown. I sat embarrassed on an armchair, illuminated by the pink and green lights of the party, with my ginger cocktail in hand. Who could have known that I would look for those red gazelles on the feet of any woman who walked past me from that evening on? A bitter ginger-flavoured awareness still clouded my tongue: I should have leapt into the void instead of ending up in bed with the vision of her in my head.

30 famous couples who have been together since forever: Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Elton John and David Furnish, David Beckham and Victoria Adams, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia De Rossi. Hold on a sec, what does “since forever” mean? This lot have been together since 2004, which, sure, is a good few years but…Aristotle and Plato, now we’re talking. Ok, not a couple, but if you say Aristotle then you say Plato, like Anaximander and Anaximenes, or, fuck knows, Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria.

I didn’t sleep a wink last night. I checked my boyfriend’s temperature with my foot, rooting through his coarse leg hairs in search of the terrycloth sock he had twisted around his ankle. I worried for a moment about his circulation, then my own (I took off my socks), and then I curled up against him for warmth. That wonderful living being—so patient, so warm, so asleep—didn’t move a millimetre. I observed the feeble orange light of the street lamps filtering through the linen curtain and I gradually became aware that the cold that had prompted me to seek out that familiar body was fading. What magical things human beings. I found myself imagining another life in which, awake, cold and pissed-off in the middle of the night, he wasn’t in my bed. The thought of those icy sheets, damp with the night breeze disgusted me. Either this human is a saint to put up with my sleepless nights or my grandmother was right when she told me that “love is endurance”. I eventually felt the call of my dreams and as I screwed up my eyelids in search of that all-encompassing black, it appeared for a moment: Prussian Blue. The first time I saw it, I’m sure I had tears in my eyes. No, not Stendhal syndrome but a nasty cold. I had organised a trip to London with the money I was given for my 18th birthday. And there I was standing in front of Van Gogh’s Starry Night while my brother told me about yet more disappointment in love. He too must have seen the blue with watery eyes, but his were actual tears. Prussian Blue, he later told me over a coffee, was discovered by chance by two guys called Diesbach and Dippel while they were trying to reproduce carmine red. In high school, his art teacher would endlessly repeat how beautiful things are never the result of a single criterion, but of chance and chaos. Apparently, after adding some potash to cochineal, they were astonished by the beautiful blue that appeared before their eyes. Ah, serendipity, as our mother would say, quoting her favourite film. Sometime after that coffee, the starry night, and a few more of my brother’s heartbreaks, I discovered that a certain Scheele, while stirring some Prussian Blue pigment with a tea spoon bearing residues of sulfuric acid, created—again by chance—one of the most important poisons of the century: cyanide. It was then that I was struck by an epiphany. Our warm bodies lying together were like Prussian Blue, or cyanide, depending on your point of view. Two elements, two parts, two bodies that one day came together to create something that could never have been predicted. Something that resembles the Creature of Frankenstein, the one that Mary Shelley brought to life when walking the corridors of the very same castle that Dippel was born in and where his journey toward Prussian Blue began. I sneak a look at my smartphone: today is already tomorrow, I’ve got an exam, and my brain is fucked.

Lately I’ve been obsessed with brown, white, and blue. Together. In the shower, I use shampoo, conditioner, and shower gel. Together. For breakfast, I drink coffee with milk, together, and I eat bread, butter, and jam, together. I wear my adidas and socks with the three stripes, always together. In the morning, I leave the house happy and sad together and take the train bored and sweaty together. My grandma and grandpa met on the train in the‘60s. They were young, I don’t remember exactly how old. They were in high school. Grandma wore her ponytail high, she told me, and I always imagined Grandpa as charming and a little serious, certainly dressed to the nines: brown suit and blue shirt. Grandma, in my vision, is wearing white. When they met they knew immediately that they were meant to be together. Or I know, with the wonderful power of hindsight. Sometimes I think about the idea of “meant to be together”, it reverberates inside me like an alarm bell. “You and K are meant to be together”. God, why would you say that? We have our problems, like everyone. You’ve got no idea the pressure that makes me feel, I swear! Look, tell my sneakers and socks they’re “meant to be together”or my butter and jam. My grandparents argued constantly, but in that frenzy of dirty looks and discussions over ridiculous things, those two spent something like fifty years together… which I don’t even have the slightest concept of. In my family, it is always said that grandfather and grandmother were “meant to be together”. Mom and Dad pretty much follow suit, despite their issues, and I wonder if it’s meant to be for me too. To be fair, there’s not much tension in my relationship: we’ve got an age gap of a few years and different tastes in clothes and dogs (he’s a pug man, I’m all about Siberian Huskies), but we balance each other out. We value and respect each other and, above all, we love each other. We share laughter and tears and at night we’ll always tuck the other one in if they’ve flung the covers off. We’re not perfect but we’re a nice fit. So were Grandpa and Grandma, Mum and Dad too.

I’ve always liked talking about how things fit together. Even when I was doing my first jigsaw puzzles, I would turn those cardboard pieces over in my hand and think how special it was that they all only made sense when connected to another piece. Even when I lean the crook of my arm on my face to rest (a gesture that I inherited from someone in the family), I swear that as a child, I always felt that that part of the body only made sense in that specific position. My forehead on his shoulder is a perfect fit too, so are our bodies locked in an embrace.