Death of a YouTuber
Miriam Kim
Etika died on June 22th, 2019. When it happened, I was vacationing in South Korea. I received the notice twelve hours late in a couple of brief sentences: “The police found his body near the banks of the river…” I read this while browsing on Twitter at a café. It was a tiny room illuminated by the afternoon light. The sunny feelings radiating from the yellow wallpaper trapped me in with the news, which hit me like a quick hard slap. The fact that it was a police report confirmed the worst rumors about his disappearance. From the official conclusion, my social media feed generated an endless flow of shock, sentiments of grief, and condolences to his family. Two drawings of gray kittens on the wall witnessed me blankly accept the death of another person.
I was scarfing down marinated Wagyu beef when the notice that he was missing created a stir on social media. He had experienced several strange outbursts and short-lived disappearances throughout the year. So I shrugged, my mind shifting to tomorrow’s shopping itinerary. A few days later, at the café, I became conscious of wearing a white dress while everyone was mourning online. My eyes couldn’t leave the phone screen until the café owner, wearing an orange apron with a cute cat face in the middle, came to give me my order. I placed my phone face down on the table, and my attention focused on the desserts she had brought me. The slice of sweet potato cream cake had the same vibrancy as the yellow wallpaper surrounding me. My green tea latte had a much more muted tone, and a few droplets of it dripped down the glass onto the polished wooden tray.
“Your cake and drink have arrived. Please enjoy!” the owner said with a warm smile. I thanked her. The past couple of weeks abroad contained many periods where I would sit down for these kinds of refreshments. Today, however, my restless appetite was dampened by the unfortunate news.
The YouTuber–nicknamed Etika–didn’t play a significant role in my personal life. But, he somehow managed to creep into many hours of my time. He was just one of the hundreds who played and talked about games. I usually didn’t think about his existence unless he appeared on the screen. It felt strange to have concerns about him during my travels when I paid the least attention to content creators.
I went back to those nights when, with a groggy mind, I watched him stream on YouTube, half-awake to his yelling, while the other half of my awareness thought about the next day at school. Some part of me at the café couldn’t help but think that, in the end, wouldn’t I be better off not watching any more of his content? I would start a new life as a college student in the upcoming fall. There would be greater consequences to watching a YouTuber all night instead of focusing on my other responsibilities. Even if I could say that his life had no impact on me, I would sacrifice time to tune into his video streams and see him messing around.
Maybe that’s why Etika’s death made me feel like I left my past behind after graduating high school. Without him, there was no going back to my irresponsible middle school and high school days. While taking bites of cake, I felt the weight of my uncertain future for the first time since graduating. I was far, in time and distance, from the responsibilities awaiting me back in America. I could lounge at foreign cafés eating sweets with no pressure from work and relationships. My appreciation for this sweet pumpkin flavor, however, kept getting interrupted by thoughts about why Etika had died. It seemed that he hid who he really was while his dark thoughts grew inside like underground mold. When they came to the surface, his audience didn’t understand how to react to him.
Etika must have felt trapped. Sure, it may not have seemed like it when he drank vodka shots like apple juice and clicked around in the deep web. But behind his crazy entertainment and infectious laughter, he had no choice but to mask his problems in front of the crowd. I did not know he had personal problems–or rather, I never bothered to think about it.
People now, including me, still ask “what if” questions about possibly preventing his death. Nobody will have those answers. Etika is gone. More accurately, Desmond Amofah is gone. The man who died in the waters below the Manhattan Bridge was the latter being. “Etika” was already dead, and the audience played around with the carcass of his persona. Perhaps my realization about the benefits of not watching him anymore meant that some childlike part of me went over with him, washed over forever by the moving tides.
Worn down by thoughts about loss, I devoured the last of my desserts to make up for some dull feeling. “Come again!” I heard the owner call out as I opened the door to leave. I thanked her again and told her that I would. But I would be gone two weeks later, wishing I had some of that cream cake on the plane. On the way back to my grandmother’s apartment, I looked over the bridge railing. Nighttime had already begun to surface in the sky, and its colorful layers were fading to darkness. The sky reflected onto the river below. Another day passed by, never to be seen again.
Miriam Kim is in the Class of 2023 at Rutgers University, majoring in English and Information Technology and Informatics. She is also pursuing a Creative Writing minor. She lives in Somerset, New Jersey, but travelled to study abroad in London during the spring 2022 semester.
Miriam wrote this piece for “Creative Non-Fiction: Writing About People Place & Performance,” a course taught by Paul Blaney. Blaney selected the work for inclusion in WHR.