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When I sleep at night, I always curl myself up, full of alertness; for I am constantly afflicted with dreadful nightmares and can not fall asleep again. -----Williams Zheng
I am a stubborn guy but feel insecure all the time. On the one hand, I am obstinate, for I refuse to take any advice from others or yield to them. I am always resolved to do whatever I take a fancy to and persist in whatever I think is right. On the other hand, I am a bit vulnerable. For when I sleep at night, I always curl myself up, full of alertness. Sometimes, I am constantly afflicted with dreadful nightmares and can not fall asleep again. They annoy me so much; sometimes, I am sunk in abject agony when I ponder over my past life and could not withdraw myself from it. It is rather a nuisance.
Often, when I am sleepless at night, I favor pacing up and down my room. After a continuous pace, I will sit down in front of my computer and drink water now and then. I usually prefer to be solitary and secluded from others in my life, in which I can enjoy a bit peaceful relish in my mind. However, in my daily life, I am always irritated by unexpected visitors. These abrupt callers are rather annoying. After all, in this fast-paced, earthly world, full of hustle and bustle, life is never a breeze so I, sometimes, need to relax myself.
Usually, in full tranquility, my close friends will flash into my mind: sometimes we hung around in the street for mere window-shopping, while other times we sneaked into some cozy pubs for a binge before cramming for an exam. Often than not, those beloved lovers in my life evoke me when I am seized with solitude. It recounts those cherished memories etched in my mind. Nights of exuberant jolliness and joviality we indulged in together gratify me so much that, a flood of tears will sweep me whenever it dawns upon me that my beloved are gone forever and never come back again.
When I am overwhelmed with desolation, I would like to pick up one of Anne’s melancholy novels and indulge myself in it. I am obsessed with her gloomy but exclusive style. It really makes me fine. In one of her novels’ preface, she mentions that there are mainly three kinds of her devout readers: the first readers are those who could not sleep a wink in deep midnight; the second kind is those subway-commuters who are always waiting for their destinations in an impatient way in the underground; the last one is exclusively for those wanderers, for they travel from one city to another and are usually worn out in their minds. For this reason, as a restless tramp, there is no wonder that I am addicted to her novels.
Solitude falls upon me especially when I stay in Nigeria, a country far away and quite different from my own motherland. I do not know how many times I wake up restlessly after a nightmare at midnight. I can not remember how many times I stop to raise my head and gaze at the sky absently and ponder upon my past life when rambling in the camp after dinner. It is a continual nostalgia. Yeah, nostalgia set in the moment I landed my feet upon this exotic country. In this very alien country, I have to endure so many different cultures and adjust myself to them. It is an interesting paradox: for, partly I lust for learning a cuture quite different from my own, which accounts for why I came to this intriguingly strange country. Partly I hesitate to adapt myself to this terrific culture.
As an erratic vagrant, I, every year, rove about, staying first in one city and then another. I have traveled for a long time and still have a long way to carry on. Perhaps, I am a bit weary and yearn for a fixed, permanent job to settle down which can secure me a promising future; yet, I know in my innermost heart, that life is not the one I long for. I was born to be a vagabond and doomed to travel without any stopover for the rest of my life. Moreover, life, I think, demands of me more than I could imagine; it is a perilous voyage: I do not know whether there is a tide in or not, or that if any, whether it will rise up to my mouth or even more; yet, I do know I will exert myself to carry on. | 
