Though I have not spoken to my father in almost four years, I still talk to him all the time, in vivid technicolor and exaggerated emotion. The landscape of sleep has always been visceral for me; my dreams often follow me into my waking hours, so real that I feel sure upon awakening that the things contained within my sleeping subconscious have been manifested into fact. The dreams I have about my father

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I don’t remember when I began tending to my dad’s back, but it must have been as soon as I was tall enough. He suffered from a kind of arthritis that left him dealing with psoriasis, and even though he’d mostly conquered the arthritis part after a hardcore round of steroids, he was left dealing with the raised, flakey skin. Every time he got out of the shower, he needed to put a special cream…