'An evening with friends' - Williams Looking through the car window

"Imagine looking out a window at an environment that is particularly significant to you. What do you see? Explain how this environment relates to you and why it is significant." (300 word limit)

Any critiques or comments are welcome. Please and thank you!

The stop light turns a green hue matching the trees' leaves around us. As cars pass by and the scenery changes, I turn away from the side window and look ahead. Adele's Chasing Pavements blasts on the stereo, and like any teenage girl would do, I belt out the lyrics without shame.

My older brother and I were going out to eat with friends for the first time that summer at a local Japanese Hibachi restaurant. The atmosphere was relaxed as the sun set in the pink-orange stained horizon. It was genuine happiness on the perfect day - no worries and no troubles, just good times and good company.

It had been a while since this feeling of bliss came over me. The semester had been more challenging than I had first expected, and after the last two months of school organizing prom, cramming for AP tests and running for student council reelection, my energy was drained.

For so long, it was as if I had merely existed. The evening with friends was a chance for me to regain the enthusiasm and optimism that I had lost. While I was not depressed or sad, I felt that reality had become a blur, and I was missing my chance to truly enjoy life.

No, it was not the epiphany where I uncovered some hidden family secret or calculated the algorithm to sustain life on Mars. It was a simple passing moment, but it was enough for me to realize that life was more than the high expectations and the GPA. It encompassed every fleeting second - each instant as important as the last.

June 2nd, 2012: I sat in the front seat of the beat-up 1990 Chevrolet. It was then when my life had begun again.

I feel like your essay is not really describing an environment but rather a context. I read the prompt as asking for an environment that was particularly important, like one that you saw everytime you did something important to you, like a window outside of where you practiced your favorite instrument or one that you looked out of before every theater performance, or an environment linked to an important event in your life, like the lawn where your crush and current long-term significant other asked you out or the street where your best friend was hit by a car and killed or something like that. By focusing on the context of one evening, the environment out of the window is really minimized, and it feels like (to me) a dodge of the prompt.

Just my opinion, tho.

Edit: Guns and combat knifes, man. ;_;

Haha I actually got the Call of Duty reference. No worries though; I'm not offended. :)

I agree with what you've said, but I guess the environment I was looking at was the evening itself... if that makes sense.

I'll look over it again and see what changes I can make.

Thanks so much!

I hate to be a grammar Nazi, but I'm almost positive that song titles usually include quotation marks. :-) Other than that, aside from agreeing with cezyou's comments, I think this is a pretty stellar essay. Your personal details (Adele, 1990 Chevrolet, etc) make it sound really sincere and fun.