It's all the same, only the names will change,
Everyday it seems we're wasting away.
To the frequent traveller, highways all look the same. The minor anomalies—the number plates, the places depicted upon road signs, the brand names plastered in a lurid clarity in ten-foot high lettering across the sides of trucks—all blurred to become the same intangible entity; insignificant details painted across the same flawed canvas. The faces that were passed—despondent through blurred windows, at the wheels of Chevies, Hondas and daring little mopeds—all spoke of the same hopes and the same subsequent failures teased out by the open road; by the anthems crooned out by rock-stars, whose lyrics presented an impossibly skewed point of view, nudged towards tell-tale inaccuracy by the plush setting of first class tour-buses.
Amy Farrah Fowler had seen two of them during her endless pilgrimages from one end of the country to another, a stale routine broken only by a brief foray into Canada (that particular adventure was chronicled only by the moose-shaped air freshener that dangled from the interior mirror). She maintained that, from the back window of the latter as it roared past, she had the privilege of spying the immeasurably dishy gaze of Jon Bon Jovi, an experience that she held close to her heart and consequently treated with as much secrecy as the government conspiracies that Amy had every reason to believe that her father was complicit in, given his propensity to drift towards a laconic nature whenever the subject was brought up.
(It transpired that the only codes he had been cracking were related to the correlation between the shade of red his various lovers' lips were painted, the clothes:skin surface area ration and the likelihood of them sleeping with him, but the revelation, however suspect it might well have been, had not yet to occur.)
In spite of her cynical evaluation of them, those songs transpired to almost solely comprise the soundtrack to Amy's road-trips. Stretched out across the back seat of the family saloon, she would prop her feet against a rogue suitcase and allow her head to loll back until she could envision it amongst the clouds. Between the frequent bickering that her parents enjoyed partaking in to pass the time and the endless stretches of dull asphalt, Amy preferred it up there, where the air was clear and the view breathtaking. It was from upon this imagined perch that she received her first view of Galveston.
The Fowlers had relocated a grand total of eight times before their only child's sixteenth birthday, four of which Amy deemed to serve no ulterior purpose other than to side-step the unfortunate backlash from their neighbours when the time inevitably came for them to acknowledge Mr. Fowler's lecherous qualities. This particular move marked the tertiary occurrence. Like the folding of proteins, Amy idly noted as they wound their way through Texas, the stature of the family's denial was intricate and yet liable to fall apart from those flimsy bonds at any given moment.
The arrival of their car, faded paint-work and all, to their destination was marked by what was apparently a sudden and inexplicable increase in temperature. In honour of the occasion, Amy detached herself from her daydreams and peered towards the city. All four windows had been dragged open as far as they would reach in a vain attempt to coax in what would have been a non-existent breeze, had the car not been hurtling forth at its current velocity, battling a sticky heat that had descended upon them like a curtain (a simile that had always struck Amy as inaccurate) the moment they had crossed the city's border.
Their home was bred in a similar calibre to that which they always occupied—white-washed wood, pockets of grass that would lay unused, neighbouring houses with whom the Fowlers would rarely converse. Like the highways that connected them, sprawling like veins across the surface of each state, there was nothing that immediately set them apart. Those carbon copies communicated some kind of pseudo-order in not only Amy's life but the tumultuous hum of suburbia—the petty grudges, allies formed and ruined over whose hedgerows brought the overall aesthetics of the street down to pitiful levels—but the snail's pace at which the car crawled through those suburbs allowed ample enough time for analysation.
By the time they groaned to a halt in their driveway, Amy had forgone that ill-advised display of naivety that her mom favoured ("This time, it'll be different.") and opted instead for a stony inspection of the residence. The paint wasn't truly white — it had peeled to a melancholy grey in the harsh glow of either the sun of years of neglect, the culprit made equally dubious by the yellowing grass that Amy hobbled out to, legs rendered momentarily useless by her extended stay in the back seat of the car. It painted a bleak picture, but it many ways, it called to some pathetic fallacy that the weather had failed to, bypassing Amy's sour mood in favour of a cheerful sheen that danced from any tangible surface. The air seemed thick in her lungs as she stretched, limbs and joints expanding with some difficulty through the humidity.
"Amy, stop daydreaming and help your Mom unload the car."
Her father's voice extracted Amy from what had indeed been a return to her apparently archetypal drift into an absence of coherent thought, eyes captured by the clear blue sky and that same, impossibly bright sun that warmed her back. She blinked and her Dad waddled past, arms compromised by two heavy suitcases that he accepted from her mother.
It wasn't a particularly taxing job—Amy's mother commandeered control for the most of it, plucking the bags from her daughter's hand as though the mere contact would cause everything to fall into disarray—but it was certainly menial and by the time the majority of their belongings had been shepherded into the shade of the house, Amy's thoughts had wandered off before she could acknowledge so. The slam of the trunk as her mother struggled with the last of the bags (Amy had put forth a valiant attempt to help, but she was ushered off with a stubborn wave of the hand) did little to lure her back to earth; the peal of voices, however, foreign with their Texan twang, succeeded where others had not.
If their dress were anything to go by, they had evidently just returned from the church to the rear of their homes, identified by the spire that reached up towards the heavens so heavily worshipped inside. The revelation was as fascinating to Amy as the family dynamic that they displayed. They appeared to be dysfunctional enough to pass for normal, the paradox itself making itself known to Amy only in retrospect. It was a state of affairs that she had no prior, personal experience of herself.
From the manner in which they trailed behind the mother, she assessed that they were an undeniably matriarchal unit (of the twins who brought up the rear, the female clearly dominated her brother). The father apparently was not best pleased by it, a conclusion drawn from the bitter argument he and his wife were engaged in, though the manner in which his children solemnly ducked their heads, Amy decided that this was not a novel occurrence. It was a lost cause to challenge the leadership of such a battleaxe, she duly noted, and yet he remained either stubborn or ignorant of this observation.
"Amy!" Her heart skipped a beat. Her parents' voices were there again, detached from their faces as the drifted out through the front door, hanging ajar. She pursed her lips in frustration. "Amy, don't hang around outside like some sort of vagabond. There's bags to be unpacked."
Oh, is there? It was on the tip of her tongue, a retort that would have sparked a predictable turn of events that inevitably ended with her father slamming the door behind him and mother and daughter curled together on the couch, the latter attempting in vain to subdue the tears that freely rolled down the cheeks of the former. The bizarre substitution of roles was not lost on Amy, who remained jealous of her mother only because her emotions so rarely snagged on the cool, albeit jarring appearance of logic.
So Amy remained silent, lips still pressed firmly together in a determined line, 180 degrees of well practiced ambivalence. She hoisted her rucksack further onto her shoulder and allowed one last, fleeting glance towards their neighbours. They themselves had retreated now to the shelter of their home, the last of the children turning as he closed the door with a peculiar air of certainty. Brown eyes met blue for such a brief moment that Amy found herself staring long after he withdrew. It took three further calls of her name on her father's part to finally lure her back inside.
Another place where the faces are so cold,
I drive all night just to get back home.
- Bon Jovi; Wanted Dead or Alive