Due to the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, I took this past semester off and have been working and exploring the Blue Ridge Mountains. Hiking and photography have helped me to combat the loneliness and lack of direction that I’ve been feeling, so I decided to combine the two and do a photo series to try to describe my feelings. I decided to take self portraits early on, but it wasn’t until banana suits came up in a conversation with a friend that I decided to incorporate them. The stark yellow would stand out against its surroundings and the uncanny image of a walking banana in the mountains just felt right. So began my journey as a lost banana, just trying to find my way home.

With everything that’s been going on, at times it almost feels as if things can’t get any worse. This project started as something to laugh at, something to fill the void while my friends went back their lives at school, but as I spent each day alone, the void felt like it was only growing larger. The only thing that seemed to alleviate it was putting the suit on and taking pictures, even with people staring at me like, well, a person running around in the mountains wearing a banana suit. Everything else that I had going on in my life — from work, to living with my parents, to the pandemic, to the goings-on of the current administration of the American government — was exhausting the little energy I possessed. I had reached a breaking point, or a turning point, or both. I no longer cared what people thought of me, if dressing up in a banana suit and taking pictures was going to make me feel better, then that was what I was going to do.

A lot of my time has been spent trying to get away from everything: from work, from responsibility, from my emotions, from the house. I’ve been feeling trapped, and running away to the mountains was a breath of fresh air in my otherwise stagnant life. The vast range made me feel both small, like a Who living on the speck on Horton’s flower, and free, like a five-finger discount Chiquita banana from Dollar General. I spent a lot of time wanting to break free from the present situation, wishing I could just fly away from it all. Even if I wasn’t sure whether or not I would be able to more permanently get away in the future, in that moment I felt as if the tether that bound me to everything had loosened a bit.

I may not know what the future holds, but I hope it’s something like this. We may not be able to stack on top one another like before, we may have to keep wearing masks and grow on separate parts of the tree, but we are together. Even though my return pictured here was brief, I know that in the future it will be a more concrete — or should I say bricked — homecoming.

In the end, all of us are going through this together, even if it doesn’t feel that way. My fellow bananas and I are going to run into 2021 with our stems to the sky.