“Ode to My Seventeenth Birthday,” written by Jeffrey Liao, really stood out to me because of the beautiful way it describes the typically intangible fleetingness of childhood and happiness. In a way, its really an ode to joy, to laughing, to doing things that aren’t right but feel that way, to feeling, to raw emotion, to freedom. There’s a strong theme of beautiful carelessness in the poem, a celebration of hope and the joy of not thinking things through and living in the moment. At one point, Liao writes “We are novitiates to a fleeting American Dream/―desperate to feel the teenage high of this forbidden rendezvous.” This really stood out to me, how we are the future of freedom, its very embodiment, how we are the future of the country when it, and its dream, is crumbling like a dropped plate into shards on the floor, all around us. 

Though that is what is being directly stated, I think what Liao was trying to convey in this poem was the facade of the pursuit of freedom, as teens, that we put up like walls; when in reality we are just as trapped and isolated as adults. Teenagers are given a reputation for being reckless and out-of-control, and this poem is almost a parody of that stereotype. Because maybe we are all clichés of our own existences, teenagers who party and forget their idle troubles, holding on to every last fleetingness of every moment that will soon be shattered when we “outrun suburbia and our parents and our troubles.” But that’s not the full story, not even close. We, too, are human beings trapped in an insufferable rat race. The tragedy of growing up is not that life will suddenly become difficult, but that there is no rush, no childhood escape from all of this madness. I’m thirteen and I’m still hiding in my own version of a “Seventeenth Birthday,” and I hope it will never end. 

Thank you, Teen Ink for all that you do so that young authors like me have the chance to be published, and for creating a way for young adults to connect over the common, inexplicable, beautiful teenage experience.