Halfway Between Red And Magenta

Chapter One (ROSA) - part 1

A/N: HELLO THERE, and welcome to the first chapter of HALFWAY BETWEEN RED AND MAGENTA. Hopefully as we go along I'll explain more about the characters, but this will be a romance novel with themes of mental health and physical illness at university. 

Media is "Breathe" by Ioish on deviantArt. 

Enjoy!

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Do you ever wonder how hard your heart works?

Sometimes, when I fill a particularly hot bath and I feel my blood pounding in my arteries, I think about those beats. Or, when I'm idling away time on a long bus journey, and my hand finds my pulse on my wrist, and I count the thumps in my radial artery rather than the seconds that pass.

And sometimes, when the days are hard, I feel my wrists and wonder what it would be like to watch my blood ooze out in those beats, to watch life drain with each pump, the precise opposite of what my heart is trying to achieve.

My heart beats eighty times every minute. My little sister, Carrie, has a condition that makes her heart beat extremely quickly at intervals, which means her heart works even harder than mine does. It probably makes up for the fact she glides through life seemingly without any effort at all. At eighteen, she's heading off to Cambridge with her triple A-star grades and her Head Girl badge and her grade eight cello. Let's not forget to add in the fact that Carrie set up her own charity, 'Headcase', two years ago, and runs marathons to raise awareness for it.

I think I broke more of a sweat jogging alongside Carrie to greet her at the marathon's finish line than she did through the whole run.

So, fast heart beats excluded, mine beats an average of eighty times per minute. If I'm feeling very philosophical, I get out my phone's calculator and note that eighty times by sixty is four thousand eight hundred times every hour. Four thousand eight hundred. I try to imagine that number in different currencies. Four thousand eight hundred pounds, for example. Or four thousand eight hundred friends. Four thousand eight hundred miles.

My heart makes a lot of effort every hour. Then I multiply that number by twenty-four and my total counts for the day is one hundred and fifteen thousand two hundred beats.

If someone told me I had to perform an action one hundred and fifteen thousand times per day, I would absolutely refuse. But my heart doesn't have much of a choice. It beats on and on and on, and never gets tired. And I wish, at times, that my brain was a lot more like my heart.

Everyone is obsessed with broken hearts. I think a broken brain is much worse. A broken heart can still beat four thousand eight hundred times. A broken brain makes you want to tear open your arteries and watch those four thousand eight hundred beats drain your life away.

I don't say any of this, however, to my mum. She's on the phone, wanting to know how I'm doing. She says it in the tone that I know what she's really asking: have you lost it again, Rosaria? Do you want to kill yourself today, Rosaria?

'Can you describe that to me, Rosaria?'

'What makes you think that, Rosaria?'

Her question brings back all those other questions I've never been properly able to answer. The psychiatrists' clinical curiosity. For someone who thinks she's eloquent with her words, I sure struggle to put my own feelings into them.