Edsa-nted kingdom

“Anak (Child), it used to be that you could not ride a Ferris wheel without crying. You were a giant wimp,” my mom wistfully recalled as I pranced around the bedroom after my date at the Enchanted Kingdom (EK) with my soon-to-be husband one Sunday. She could not believe her ears when I said that I went for the death-defying rides there.

I shrugged and thought about it for a minute or two. I must say my life as an Edsa commuter has helped me prepare for the giant amusement park rides. If there were flyer miles for the frequency with which I travel through Edsa, I’d be able to go to the moon and back.

The EK regular day pass was one of my gifts to my fiancé. I was out of town for an engineering project then, and I felt so bad that I went on an online shopping frenzy to get the best gift a faraway girlfriend can provide. The tickets were to expire shortly. The earlier “Let’s go there when you’re free” became “We should go there immediately!”

Fortunately, we were able to make time. He was grouchy all morning due to sleepiness as we rode the van from Starmall to Balibago, Sta. Rosa. But grouchiness turned to amusement when he started off with his favorite rides. I am beyond impressed with the boyfriend’s bumper car skills, although I am hesitant for him to apply that same savoir faire in the common thoroughfares of real life.

I was the daredevil that Sunday, wearing a ridiculously young-looking red headband that caused people to stare. The red headband had a giant flower on it. But I didn’t care. I was genuinely happy with what it looked like, no matter what it looked like to everyone else. At 27, I rarely get the chance to sport the headbands that were the epic signature to my otherwise bland all-girls, private-school uniform decades ago.

I admit that even I surprised myself when I was raring to be hoisted up in an agonizing slow motion to have a perfect view of Laguna and its mountains and buildings… only to free-fall and have a swift taste of gravity’s grip in less than a wink. That’s the EKstreme tower experience. Previous batches of brave souls were screaming their heads off. But as I was secure in the tightness of the enclosure built to protect me from flying out of the tower during the ride, I felt…POWERFUL.

It was as if I owned the world (well, Laguna only) in that split second before immediately being thrust downward. I thought: This is the closest thing to heaven that I can reach sitting down without having to climb another mountain. I felt silent panic, but no sound came out of my mouth. My legs were like paper, thin and floating in the open air during the quick fall. My beloved boyfriend was on the ground, videotaping my brave escapade and scared witless to try it himself. (He’s really the more cautious between us, honestly.)

Fast-forward to almost 24 hours later, when I was riding the bus on my way home. It was the same bump in each hump, it was the same paper-like legs, but this time it was from the numbness of being cramped in a tiny space, clutching all my stuff on my lap. In Cubao, it smelled like someone’s lunchbox (can’t decide between eggs or boiled beef). At Centris, it smelled like a rotten canal.

Such is the life of the commuter. It seems we are in this unamusing amusement park that runs daily. It’s a prolonged procession to getting home after a hard day’s work. It’s like riding EK’s Space Shuttle—but you realize in the Space Shuttle that your terrors end after the circular rings have been done with, as long as all the ride’s bolts are in place.

On Edsa, the buses choose their own path like those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books of my childhood. And if they decide to hit the space they shouldn’t, lives can be lost. A bus hits the flyover or falls off the flyover, and people just DIE. When I ride a bus with a possessed driver, I start cramping together all my philosophical thoughts and I become an instant existentialist genius while I mentally bid goodbye to them just in case I am the next commuting casualty to hit the headlines.

It’s ironic that while the dangers are the same in the giant highway of Metro Manila and in the amusement park in Laguna, the effect is different. In an EK ride, I feel invincible as I voluntarily endanger myself. In a ride through Edsa, I feel powerless as I succumb to the power trip of someone else (drugged drivers, angry drivers, drivers in general) on the road.

As I partially returned to a commuting lifestyle (a thing I managed to avoid through expensive cab rides and condo rentals in the previous year), I realized that I am in fact a city girl, but a very frightened one. I am frightened of sudden swerves of bully buses on Edsa and belittling the rest of the vehicles in their midst. I am frightened of weird male copassengers whose members seem to rear inconveniently while rubbing at my left shoulder when I sit on an aisle seat. I am frightened of cockroaches emerging from the uncleaned panels by the window. I am frightened of snatchers and slashers (I had my favorite bag slashed once in Farmer’s Market Cubao and only realized it when I was already in the MCU area).

I am one small lady with huge fears, as huge as the Wheel of Fate’s circumference.

So I bought cab rides, notwithstanding the statistic that a taxi can get smashed more easily in the bully bump vehicle fest initiated by flammable trucks and buses. Ensconced in the comforts of the air-conditioning minus the pushing and shoving of other rush-hour drones, I can delude myself that I am in a safer place when I am riding a cab. It’s a thing few people will understand, a thing that some officemates may whisper about because, after all, who am I to afford those rides when the company owner’s girlfriend takes the MRT?  (Try going to MRT North Station at 7 a.m. and you will understand my needs.)

I wonder when the day will come where I can translate the invincibility and calm I felt in EKstreme tower to the throes of extreme Edsa. At this point, I nurture a love-hate thing for it: love for my wallet and financial goals, hate for losing my comforts in getting to and from work. Sometimes I am thankful for the heavy traffic because it’s the perfect cork stopper for madmen drivers. It’s the perfect time to catch up on unread messages on my Blackberry or pages of that favorite novel that has collected dust on my bookshelf. It’s the perfect time to just be (while keeping the alertness required to fight off the Edsa boys who open car doors to grab passengers’ cell phones and whatnots), to meditate on life, and to try to be as peaceful in the city as I was peaceful when I was viewing the scenery from Laguna’s amusement park top.

I guess a fearful lady like me can take more risks in Edsa-nted Kingdom if there is some safety to give up, to begin with. Until then, I will just risk my entire self on an EK roller coaster than subject myself to an uncontrolled roller-coaster of another person’s making.

Helen Mary Labao, 27, is an engineer in a consulting firm. She says she is also “an aspiring novelist and an incensed commuter who always dreams of star-studded, candy-colored and high-speed taxis to replace rinky-dink buses.”