One of my first memories was at my parent’s first house. Summertime. Brightest day ever. Kept my left eye closed and my right squinted to the point I could barely see through my eyelashes. Hunter shooting through the brush. There was a sea of yellow in our front yard—dandelions everywhere. It made me feel like there was a glitch in reality. I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity. Picked as many of those yellow suckers as I could for my mom.

Minutes later I had as many dandelions as I could ball up in my fists. It seemed like an unsurmountable amount of flowers. I remember trying to jam more stems into my palm, but what I had was already spilling out of my grasp. I went to the front door to present the bouquet to my mother. She told me to wait. Came back with a camera and took a picture. I saw the picture last week. In retrospect I didn’t grab nearly as many dandelions as I remembered. Makes sense, the quantity of flowers I could bear to hold was relative to my size. I gave her all I could muster in my tiny hands, but now I can easily handle 10x that amount of dandelions in my beefy hands.

I feel like this is the case for most things as a child, the older you get the more competent and more abilities you gain. I wonder if the love in my heart grew like this too. Has had me thinking recently if I can love 10x as much as I could as a child? If so, I am failing. I try to be a loving person, yet intrusive pretentious thoughts often emerge from the subconscious. I constantly hate things which I do not like, wasting energy on something I don’t give a shit about anyways. I strive to grow as a person and have 10x more love than I used to have the capacity for. Like my tiny hands, my heart has also grown, the capacity for which I can love must’ve also grown and it is my responsibility to love that much, to fill my hands with 10x dandelion than I have in the past.