Dear journal,
Last night, I dreamed the bananas were gone. Not just scarce—extinct. Like some golden species of bygone eras, they had slipped quietly out of existence, leaving only yellowed memories in fruit bowls and cereal ads.
In the dream, I met a man who had made it his life’s purpose to bring them back. He carried a canvas satchel stitched with patches from every corner of the world. Inside it: vials of soil, hopeful clippings, sun-faded photographs of vanished groves. He said he’d once eaten a banana as a child, and the taste had never left him—sunlight wrapped in softness. Now he wandered from jungle to marketplace to seed bank, chasing a memory. He believed the seed still existed somewhere, just hidden, waiting to be found.
We spoke in a ruined greenhouse overtaken by moss. I asked him why he cared so much about something so simple, and he looked at me as though I’d asked why stars should return after night.
When I woke, I remembered that old clip of Kirk Cameron explaining—with divine confidence—that God had designed bananas to fit the human hand. As if modern fruit came pre-packaged by Providence, not by human cultivation. A joke, almost. One that lingers. The banana he held was a Cavendish—sterile, seedless, mass-produced. Not a gift of Eden, but the product of convenience, design, and the slow erasure of what once was wild.
And then I thought of banana pudding. Not the store-bought kind, but real pudding layered with vanilla wafers, whipped cream, and slices of fresh banana—soft, cold, and sweet. How would we remember bananas if they were truly gone? Not through memories of pudding or afternoon snacks or the bruised fruit in school lunchboxes—but through the artificial echo in something like a banana Runts candy. That neon, chemical tang. A parody of fruit. All that would be left is a ghost of the flavor, floating in the aisles of gas station candy racks.
Maybe the dream is about more than fruit. Maybe it's about the quiet extinction of the simple, the real, the once-vital things we no longer notice until they're gone. Or maybe it's about the seekers—the ones who go looking anyway. The man in the dream might be a part of me, or the kind of person I want to be. Someone who believes the seed is still out there.
It’s strange how a dream can feel like both a joke and a pilgrimage. A reflection of how we mourn what we didn’t realize we loved. Or maybe it was just about bananas.
Hard to say,
Dave