the two people they could have met in heaven

Three pairs. Six entrance tickets.

Lights glimmer amidst the backdrop of numerous multicolored wheering contraptions, a thousand clothes that wait in vain before it encounters the thousand-and-one hand, and a night that is filled with ubiquitous hourly chit-chats.

And there it is, busily spinning around with its post-metallic skeleton looking as aged as the looks of the handler’s smile and as fragile as the wallet of the nearby gambler.

The 3.2 megapixel camera is ready.

We had a holistic day last Saturday, November 18 2006. For the linguistic capabilities part, I became an instant quizmaster for a certain inter-high school competition in the morning of which I had given out science and tech questions and elaborately mouthed the perfect spelling words (a lot failed in this category)! The good deed of the day? We cleaned the tWS office! For sports, most of the tWS staffers went for a Kickball game that lasted for about an hour with our clothes looking like it was newly washed. For a cool memory enhancer, we reminisced high school IQ tests of which I fairly won over Dodong Jan Jan (ha ha). There’s only one thing that didn’t live up to what we had planned: we failed to watch a movie at night that we longed for a long time ago.

In order to cover up the unexpected and disappointing turn of events that night and to stretch our high spirits, we went to the all time Pinoy favorite, the Perya. Upon nearing the entrance, our smiles were so wide that I think I could have felt mine reaching both tips of my ears.

I was so glad that when I had entered the enclosed colorful niche within and the moment I had seen the first ride, my mindset was to get on it as soon as possible; no more decision-decisions, no more turning back. And when everyone agreed, we all went into the Ferris Wheel -- the one that had open carriages.

Dirg and Cloudy went together as the first pair (who obviously were the most excited in the group), I was left with Marianne since she had no partner too because the last two persons were now paired way before the idea of perya struck us; they are Dodong Jan Jan and Donna.

We seated snuggly into our open-air compartment – I even wriggled my toes in front of me and felt the cold 8:45 evening wind as the gears began to turn. I was happy. We were happy. But we never knew that this innocent ride could be sinister after a few minutes:

The wheel turned slowly.
I croaked merrily.
The whole ride stopped.
Our compartment was at the topmost part.
I grabbed my camera.
I looked for angles that encompass the whole joyous night.
I found the perfect angle.
I purposely held the camera behind us.
The whole carriage swung forward.
We nearly fell –
a near death experience.

In a matter of millimeters, our lives could have ended earlier than expected. Being a picture freak, I could not resist the clicking and flashing of the camera especially that we were at the top among the rest – the view was just superbly picturesque. But then the whole enthusiasm faltered in an instant when the pull of gravity was in front of us that made us to unpredictably lunged forward, sweated coldly, and spoke immediate words of wisdom. It is a good thing that our natural instincts got ahead of our numbed thinking very fast; we instantaneously sit upright in our seats frigid making the whole compartment stayed on its right balance. Phew. Mar, I am sorry.

If it couldn’t have happened that way, well surely I daresay there will be two people the heavens would welcome openly. Yeah heaven, not the other way around. And one more news, Dodong Jan Jan was also awestruck and mute for seconds after the ride, not because he was mesmerized but because his heart clogged his throat.

For short, that was close.
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