Death Note Thoughts 10 Years Later
I started watching Death Note when I was around 13, which was 10 years ago.
I got to episode 25 and, for obvious reasons, stopped and never continued. Death Note was an enormous part of my life though and I discovered Matt and Mello’s characters and fell in love with them. I was obsessed with Death Note and met some online friends through role playing groups on Facebook. It quickly took over all my time.
The characters, the fanfiction, the role playing; these were all means of escapism that I clung to. I desperately consumed as much Matt and Mello content as I possibly could and spent every waking hour thinking about them. Life really sucked at the time and thinking about these two made it suck a little less. I even met my ex-partner through Matt and Mello and stayed with him for seven years.
And even though I’m no longer in that relationship, and even though I don’t think about Matt and Mello every day and haven’t for a few years, I recognize how important they all were to my life. How each story and post kept me alive just a bit longer. How projecting my feelings and my hardships and my worries onto characters I loved helped me process those feelings and, later in life, eventually own those feelings.
At one point, maybe I was 15, I wondered how I could even lead a life without thinking about these characters. They were everything to me and it seemed impossible to think they could ever not be present in my life. So I continued to love them. And when my ex and I wondered if we would ever meet in person (we did) and roleplay the characters while we sat back to back with our laptops (we didn’t) I felt happy to be alive. We felt grown up thinking about a life together, but we weren’t grown up at all, and that’s okay. We grew up eventually and we also grew apart, and that’s okay too.
I put so much hope and pain and anger and sadness and yearning into everything I wrote about Matt and Mello. I put my whole heart into it. Into every word. And it helped me grow and it helped me heal some too. I didn’t realize for a few years that I was projecting onto them all the heartaches I couldn’t seem to face head-on. I think I was embarrassed at first too, to realize these characters were actually me. Me in all of my different forms. Me with all my teenaged pain and loss. To me, Matt and Mello were a way I found to cope, even if I didn’t realize that until after they had served their purpose.
I finished watching Death Note just this past weekend. I picked it up in the midst of this pandemic and decided it was time. I didn’t cry like I always thought I would, but part of me does feel like, not just a chapter, but a whole book has finally come to a close. I liked it more than I thought I would. And, at the end, I could feel a teenage me finally letting go when all he ever did was hold his breath.
And now I’m 23. And I live in a small apartment in a city like I always wanted to do. I talk to friends sometimes. I bake. I sing. I laugh. I drive through the countryside and stare at an enormous midwest sky. And I love, too. I love with my whole heart.
Art speaks in ways we never imagine it would. So keep writing those characters who sing teens to sleep and keep creating worlds that children can’t get enough of, you might end up saving someone like me.
With all my love,
James
