He couldn’t keep his hands still.  He tried to control their motion by washing dishes, darning socks; he ran his hands through his hair, or stroked one of the thirty cats that roamed his abode.  But he couldn’t focus and so nothing was ever finished.

His legs jiggled when he sat; when he stood he danced an unending jig.  The motion interfered with his every task, and he wore a perpetually put-upon air as if mildly disgusted with himself.  He only slept when completely exhausted by uninterrupted days of restless wakefulness.

He’d not touched a paintbrush in years.

But he still insisted on calling himself a painter, an artiste, a maestre at the the forefront of the craft.  Or he would have, if anyone ever talked to him, because that was another side effect of his condition.  

He had become almost completely non-verbal.  The energy made his mind move too quickly for his mouth to keep up.  He would attempt to explain to a student, to a critic, to a pigeon, the genesis of some aspect of one of his early works and how it informed and impacted his current oeuvre, but his mouth could only engage for perhaps one word in eight.

“I…blue…space…wildly…under…see?!”

He managed to survive on a dwindling trust fund and the attentions of a long-suffering aide.  

He knew he was in trouble.  In more ways than the obvious, or even the easily inferred.

He was in fact reaching the end of his rope, as they say, and he had no way of tying the proverbial knot.  He couldn’t focus his hands enough to complete said task.

One day he snapped.  He’d never been athletic, had often mocked those who so used their bodies as underdeveloped, atavistic.  But the energy.  So much energy.  He gave up.  He leaped from the chair he had placed before a canvas blank so long it had become yellow, threw open a window, and fled into the forest that surrounded the commune.

He ran heedless, narrowly avoiding snaring vines and stabbing branches.  He ran at full speed.  His thoughts were soon drowned by his pulse.  He was no longer overwhelmed by his doubt.  His awareness contracted to a point of light somewhere in front of his unseeing eyes.  He felt nothing at all, existing only as a single moving point in space.

He ran for hours.  And as the sun was setting, he stopped.  He did not tremble, shake, or jiggle.  He stood perfectly motionless for the first time in years.  Sunlight slashed low between the trunks of trees he could not identify, washing over his left shoulder.  He wasn’t breathing hard.  He was barely breathing at all.  He held up his hands and looked at them in the light, that golden light he had so long ago worked so hard at capturing, recreating.  His hands looked young and strong in that light, and he thought, “I could paint, now.”

Then the light failed.  And he fell.