In the backyard of my house is a clump of various kinds of hoary trees- pines, mangoes and sort of-which is a home for thousands of birds. On one evening, while strolling around there, I unexpectedly encountered a bird lying prostrate on a root of the tree. I rushed to it, realizing it had got hurt but was still alive by noticing its weakly flapping wings. Without hesitation, I took it to home.


That is how I first met with Nicky, a dark-brown, young swallow. After healing his wounds, I kept him in a wooden cabinet at a corner of my room. Later, my parents bought me a beautifully crafted cage to put him. As the time passed by, he has become docile and the bond between us has been firmer. Whenever I came into the room, he fluttered excitedly around the cage.


But, one day, when I paced into my room, to my surprise and dismay, I saw the broken cage on the floor with no Nicky in it. Then my younger brother came to me to confess that it was because of him.


Distracted, I despondently walked to the backyard, where I was captivated witnessing a flock of bustling swallows on the ground. “Maybe Nicky will be in that flock”, I groaned, “I can’t extract him because they are all nearly the same.”


As I turned toward home with despair, a swallow darted straightly toward me from the crowd and rested on my shoulder, flapping its wings and making me dumbfounded. “Nicky, are you?” “ Of course it’s him, my intuitions know him!” I told myself. I grasped him and whispered, “You will be lost forever and be nothing if you don’t know how to make me to realize you”


Picking him back home, I pondered over that event which is resonating with my life. I am always willing to be unique and conspicuous. In math and sciences subjects, I sought the different ways to calculate and comprehend the logics and reasons. In classroom, it is I who was standing out to prove how my own methods are effective, and was elatedly satisfied when teachers approved them.


Besides utilizing it in education, I tenaciously hold my quirk in everything. In chess games, I usually plan to make gambits and attacks with unusual strategies, and surprise the audience with smartly procured checkmates. Likewise, I drew Manga (Japanese comic) that is so rare in my surrounding, and achieved a reputation as the adroit Manga artist in school. Of course, my willingness to be unique is largely concerned with my dream: to be an engineer who contributes the world by his innovations.


Some people have gibed me that my penchant to be different was just like self-centeredness and lack of consonance with others. Yet, my aspirations to unique ways have developed acumens in facing matters with diverse perspectives and giving out own creations. Because of such skills and work, many scientists have overcome the obstacles blurring the truths of nature and been distinct among all normal people. Actually, such as those scientists and my Nicky have triumphed, I am doggedly struggling to reveal distinctively myself among my family, friends and, to be exact, among all people.


Engrossing deeply in those thoughts along the way, I quietly reached my room. After emancipating from long thoughts, I gazed at Nicky, who was lounging smugly in my warm clutch, and told, “Well, you have grown enough. I think this is the time to set you free”. But, before I let him go, I tied tightly a red handkerchief to his neck as a valedictory gift and hurled gently him into outside through the window.


There, under the azure sky, he flew up to the breaking clouds, where he merged into the sea of cheeping swallows. Despite the physical uniformity of them, I could see him prominently, even in a far distance, with red handkerchief billowing around his neck.