You were

An early speaker, alert, loud and bright. An unsteady walker, then again an early reader, a writer, a finger painter, an imagined hero. A slow runner. Then, a reversal, a quiet paradox- the silent pauses after coming home from school, the inability to speak to strangers. A budding mathematician, a scholar, an obedient teenager, a forced musician. A manic desire to achieve, the gap between reality and dreamed goals, shoulders slumped with guilt after failure. An inventor, a tinkerer, and later, just as a hobby, a watchmaker. An insomniac, a 2 am runner even in December, a half-hearted philosopher. A poor cook, but an excellent baker. Evidence that a life lived inside the walls of the mind must end in disaster, that even a space so brilliant can never be quite wide enough. Obsessive, but graceful to the last. Soft-spoken. Lonely. A jumper, a statistic. But mostly, too weak.