Across State Lines
When I was 10 years old, my grandparents and I took a road trip to visit our extended family, 655 miles and 11 hours from Ohio to South Carolina. We divided our drive into two days.
At 5:00 a.m. it was barely dawn, and our car was packed with suitcases and snacks to sustain us for the long journey ahead. For a moment, I experienced a quiet and peaceful world.
As we drove, I sat perched against the backseat window as cars on the other side of the median strip traveled in the opposite direction. Ohio passed behind us as we approached the “Welcome to West Virginia” sign. The urge to extend my legs and explore increased with each passing vehicle.
Five hours into our journey, we stopped at a hotel and I jumped out of the parked car to help unload bags and suitcases. After dropping our luggage off and acquainting ourselves with the room we’d be staying in overnight, my grandparents and I decided to use the remaining daylight hours to visit a shopping center that featured local artists.
We wandered around the building, examining books, paintings, and handmade quilts.
After turning a few corners, I found myself in a hidden nook, surrounded by small, stained glass pieces displayed against a protective backdrop. I thought I could sit there forever, tracing the intricate metal lines dividing the fragments of glass.
We left the hotel the next day. Our remaining five-hour journey was crisscrossed by state lines — Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina — just like so many shards of stained glass.
***
I haven’t visited my extended family in South Carolina since the trip with my grandparents nine years ago. I realize now, in ways that I did not understand then, that we’re divided by more than the states that stand between us.
That final visit was just before the 2016 presidential election — the start of the polarization between my extended family in South Carolina and my family at home in Ohio. Because I was 10 years old, I didn’t understand the role this would play in my relationship with some of my family members. I didn’t have an opinion, let alone a conception of how a president’s policies could uproot the family life I knew.
Because of their differing opinions, my extended family and household held an unspoken agreement that politics were private and certain names should not be brought up. But after the election in 2024, this vow quickly disappeared.
Tensions between the Ohio and South Carolina branches of my family increased through heated discourse on social media. A polarized nation bled into the fabric of my family — left and right wing politics separating us more than our physical distance.
I hated seeing the people I love be callous and unforgiving because of their differing opinions, so after voting in the 2o24 election, I felt like it was only right to keep my political stance private. I didn’t want to contribute further to the tense dynamic forming across state lines — my fear of losing these relationships stopping me from asserting my values as an informed adult.
I don’t want to believe that sharing my political values would force a personal divide between me and my family or intensify an already fractured dynamic. I don’t want to believe our relationships can’t endure because we disagree, that we can’t reflect on the inherent love we have for each other as people before considering our feelings about a political candidate.
With society’s expectations of advocacy, of choosing a side and vocalizing opinions online, you risk allegations of complacency and the inability to identify right versus wrong if you do not contribute. I have been close to walking across the divide and revealing my political identity, yet I know if I acted on my belief system, my familial bonds would be irreparably damaged.
***
Before this polarization, there was a time when my family could acknowledge differing opinions and find a way to move forward. There was a time when we were willing to drive 11 hours to visit each other — when love was at the center.
I grieve for the version of my family that existed before 2016, and yet I realize our relationship may never be mended. This friction exists because our values fundamentally differ, but I want to believe that the blood we share and the love we have for each other can somehow be reconciled with the truth of our differences.
Sometimes I feel stuck in the median strip, stuck between two sides. It’s as though I am the metal forging two pieces of fragmented glass together. Pretending there is no disconnect between my family in Ohio and South Carolina is not the solution, but existing in the space between extremely polarized sides is also not possible. It’s a lonely thing to be the material soldering together two pieces of broken glass.
The truth of this situation is that from Ohio to South Carolina, my family is diametrically opposed, divided by our conflicting core morals. We may never agree; our relationship may never be the same. However, idolizing politicians, who are not there for the life-changing moments — a parent’s funeral, the birth of a child — is discarding and rejecting the red of our shared blood for the red of a political party.
Instead of an 11-hour road trip dividing us, it’s a person we’ve never met, a person who wasn’t there when I graduated high school or when I won my dance competitions.
He wasn’t involved when my aunt sent a care package to my hospital room and he’s not a member of our family. But his presence exists in the silence between us; he is a shadow preventing us from finding our way across the interstate.
It should be easy to step over that shadowy line into one another’s patches of colored light, but it isn’t. He certainly won’t budge but they can, and choose not to.
I want to find a way to drive to South Carolina from Ohio without acknowledging the states that divide us, to take the blue and red pieces of stained glass and forge them together to create a purple mosaic. But, there is no way to pretend the distance does not separate us, that a metal boundary is what connects broken glass.
—Magazine writer McKenzie E. Lemmo can be reached at mckenzie.lemmo@thecrimson.com.