AGE [vs Brent Kersh & Scarecrow]

Time encompasses everything. Time rules all. Time is vast, unknowable to most.

But not unknowable to me. To me time is a gigantic network of spirals and bends and turns and portals and wormholes. All of time is all at once and yet so expansive through each dimension.

But to mortals, time needs to be simple. They break it down into the simplest version of itself, so they can begin to comprehend its magnitude and magnificence. They treat time like a flat line, starting at A and moving to B. Day to day, until their time is up. Time is the measure of their world. Time is regular to them.

There are many examples of this behaviour, were you to study a mortal. The biggest and most obvious case of this is age. Age is completely irrelevant to time, but mortals have always had a need to label things. They’ve created seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, but years are what they celebrate most. They throw parties, have fun and count the years since their birth like it means anything.

Brent Kersh has seen more than five decades of these arbitrary years pass him by, and still his life stumbles from tragedy to tragedy. He lost his daughter, then found her again, and now she’s gone again. He doesn’t see the rest of his family because of the darkness surrounding his life. The closest thing to family that he saw regularly – Phoebe Outlaw – she has gone too. When his next year passes, what has he to celebrate?

The Scarecrow has lived longer still, surviving for millennia. Yet the hay man finds himself, time after time, clashing with the entity that created him like a petulant schoolchild. This only shows that age does not determine behaviours. It does not determine personality because it is a human construct designed to pacify those who can never begin to comprehend real time. Should the Scarecrow celebrate his next year any differently to a mortal? How many years went by until it ceased to matter how old he was?

As each year passes, and each wretched celebration taints the Earth, I can’t help but smile to myself. Don’t they understand? They hold on to these birthdays as a badge of honour, as a token of part of a life lived. They have it completely wrong. These years mortals created, they don’t count up, like an honour system… they count down to each individual’s inevitable end, the clock ticking towards their own personal doomsday.

And that clock counts down for both Brent and the Scarecrow now, along with everyone in this world, as the Virus takes hold. Mike Lane’s sacrifice fought back the darkness for a short while longer but those of us who can see that the end of the world as we know it is the only way forward can see the truth. The truth is that no matter how hard you fight it, it is only a matter of time.