Orin's Phoenix morning (ii)
It’s the mornings after the spider-and-heights dreams that are the most painful, that it takes sometimes three coffees and two showers and sometimes a run to loosen the grip on his soul’s throat; […] Even when alone, able to uncurl alone and sit slowly up and wring out the sheet and go to the bathroom, these darkest mornings start days that Orin can’t even bring himself for hours to think about how he’ll get through the day. These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light—the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.
Context
Orin's condition at full length: a day that must be climbed rather than traversed, sleep as a fall off something sheer — dread rendered as physical geometry, and the theme's strongest non-clinical statement before Kate's ward scene. (Carlisle hears Sisyphus in the "climbed"; recorded as his reading.)