jeepney fare adjustments and other unspoken griefs

notes on adulting, counting silver coins, and the quiet tax of moving forward

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the metallic ring of five-peso coins clinking against each other in the palm of my hand used to mean freedom.

when i was fourteen, twenty pesos was an entire afternoon. it covered the jeepney ride to school, a stick of kwek-kwek near the gate, and the ride back home with two shiny pesos to spare. you dropped the coins into the driver's tray, called out your destination with full confidence, and waited for your change to travel back to you through a bucket-line of tired palms.

yesterday, i sat on the faded red vinyl bench of a traditional jeepney, wedged between a nursing student reviewing index cards and an older man carrying a sack of rice. the driver called out the new base fare. fifteen pesos.

i looked down at the loose change resting in my palm. ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen.

kulang ng piso.

i had to dig through the bottom of my canvas tote bag, past crumpled receipts and half-empty water bottles, just to find a single copper coin. my cheeks burned hot under my kn95 face mask.

eto na ba 'yun? is this what adulting is supposed to feel like?

we do not notice ourselves growing up through grand events. we notice it in the small escalations of everyday life. we feel it when the things that used to be simple suddenly demand more from us than we prepared to give.

in the philippines, there is a specific kind of math you learn when you commute. it is not the kind of math sir castillo teaches you in his calculus lectures. it is the real-time arithmetic of survival on the road.

you calculate the exact balance in your wallet against the days left in the week. you calculate how far you can walk before your knee gives out just to save a ten-peso tricycle fare. you learn to gauge if a sky blue sky means rain in twenty minutes, because rain means surge pricing, and surge pricing means you do not eat dinner at school.

the real tax of growing up is realizing that the destination remains unchanged, but the cost to reach it keeps rising.

when i was younger, i thought money was just something adults complained about during sunday family dinners. naririnig ko lang sa gilid habang kumakain ng jollibee na pasalubong pa ng kapatid ng tatay ko. i heard my mother sighing over the electric bill. i watched my father inspect the receipt at the grocery store and whispering under his breath about the price of onions or milk.

back then, it sounded like background noise. it sounded like an adult habit, something you automatically inherit once you start working, like drinking black coffee or complaining about back pain.

now that i am nineteen, i realize it was never a habit. it was a slow and suffocating weight.

the base fare going up by two or three pesos does not sound like a national tragedy on paper. the news anchors read the statistics in flat, neutral tones. but on the ground, inside a moving metal box swaying along asphalt roads, those extra pesos mean everything.

it means a high school student skipping a meal. it means a street vendor walking three blocks further to keep their profit margin alive. it means realizing that your allowance, which felt like wealth five years ago, is now barely enough to keep you moving in a straight line.

are we outgrowing our cities or are our cities outgrowing us?

i spent my childhood thinking that the world would stay still until i was ready for it.

i thought the landmark bakery on the corner of our street would always sell five-peso cheese pandesal. i thought my childhood friends would always be available for a random tuesday afternoon hangout. i thought the route from my house to the city center would always cost the same amount of effort, money, and heart.

perang pambili ng oras. that is what fare really is. you are paying someone to move your heavy body across a crowded space because you do not have the energy to walk it yourself.

lately, every trip feels heavier.

i look at my classmates in college. for context, i study at up, so very evident na palagi kaming sumasakay sa jeep. we are all nineteen or twenty, standing right on the terrifying threshold of real adulthood. we talk about midterms and internship applications, but underneath all that academic noise, we are talking about the exact same fear.

natatakot tayo na baka hindi natin kaya.

we are terrified that by the time we graduate and the world will have priced us out of living comfortably. we watch housing costs skyrocket while entry-level salaries remain frozen in time. we watch our parents get older, their shoulders slumping just a little lower every year, and we realize that the safety net we relied on was made of human flesh and blood all along.

one day, you are a passenger holding your parent's hand while they pay for your ticket. the next day, you are the one digging through your pockets, praying you have enough change to cover your own seat.

and nobody warns you about the transition. you just wake up one morning and realize that you are responsible for getting yourself home.

isa sa mga napapansin kong sobrang gandang tradition sa jeepney ay ang pakikisuyo. yung hindi ka nga mautusan sa bahay pero some complete strangers ayy nakikisuyo sayo.

you sit shoulder to shoulder with strangers whose names you will never know. when someone at the far end of the vehicle says, "bayad po," you do not ignore them. you reach out your hand. you take their sweaty coins, feel the warmth of their skin for a fraction of a second, and pass it down the line to the person next to you until it reaches the driver.

when the change comes back, the reverse happens. "sukli po ni ma'am," someone says, and the coins travel back through five pairs of hands until they land safely in the lap of the person who asked.

it is a quiet system of trust. we just assume that everyone in the vehicle agrees on one thing: we all just want to reach our stop.

a jeepney ride is proof that we are capable of carrying each other’s burdens, even if it is only for three kilometers at a time.

lately, i have been thinking about how much emotional labor we pass down the line in the exact same way.

when chenlee, my friend tells me she failed a quiz because she had to work a late night shift at a cafe, i take that pain and pass her my notes. when jiro, my classmate forgets his lunch, someone splits a meal with him without asking questions. we pass small acts of kindness back and forth because we know how cold the city gets when you have to face it entirely alone.

pero nakakapagod din.

it is exhausting to live in a culture that romanticizes our ability to suffer together. we praise the "resilience" of commuters standing in line for two hours under the blazing sun. we make heartwarming videos about people wading through floodwaters just to get to work on time.

we turn economic hardship into a test of character, as if surviving unfair conditions is something we should be proud of instead of something we should be furious about.

why must everything be a test of endurance? why does existing here feel like an endless series of minor sacrifices? what happens to the grief that has nowhere to go?

when you are eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty one, or as you navigate the adulthood, people treat your sadness like a temporary condition.

"bata ka pa," they tell you with a dismissive wave of their hand. "marami ka pang kakaining bigas."

they assume your anxieties are simple and temporary. they think you are only stressed about exams, broken hearts, or social media drama. they do not realize that young people today are grieving things that do not have names yet.

we are grieving the future we were promised when we were children. we are grieving the quiet certainty that if we worked hard and stayed in school, we would easily build a comfortable life.

nawawala na 'yung kasiguraduhan.

every time the price of gasoline goes up, every time the jeepney fare adjusts, every time the price of a basic meal creeps higher, a small piece of our security dissolves. it is the realization that the world is getting harder to survive in, and we are entering it with empty hands.

yet, we do not scream.

instead, we tap our silver coin against the metal roof of the vehicle. we whisper, "para po." we step down onto the wet asphalt, adjust the strap of our heavy backpacks, and keep walking toward our destination.

we bury our grief deep in our chests because there is no time to unpack it. the traffic keeps moving behind us. the crowd on the sidewalk keeps pushing forward. if you stop to cry on the side of the road, you miss your next ride.

so you keep moving. you pay the higher fare. you drink your cold coffee. you tell yourself that you will figure it out tomorrow.

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i reached my stop near the university campus around eight in the morning.

the sun was hitting the pavement, turning the rising exhaust smoke into an eerie golden haze. i handed my fifteen pesos to the driver, making sure to include the tiny copper coin i had salvaged from the bottom of my bag.

"salamat po," i whispered.

the driver did not look back. he just grabbed the coins, tossed them into his wooden box, and stepped on the gas pedal. the engine roared that released a dark cloud of smoke as the jeepney surged forward into the morning rush.

i stood on the curb for a long moment and watched it disappear into the sea of private cars, buses, and motorbikes.

i am nineteen years old. i do not have all the answers. i do not know how i am going to navigate the next ten years of my life in a country that often feels like it is running on borrowed time and empty gas tanks.

growth is not a clean, victorious march forward.

it is a messy, uncomfortable adjustment. it is learning how to hold space for your disappointment while still finding the strength to buy your morning commute. it is recognizing that the world will keep changing its prices, but you can choose not to let it bankrupt your capacity for kindness.

i checked my pocket. i still had twenty pesos left.

it was not much. it was certainly not as powerful as twenty pesos used to be when i was a child with clean shoes and zero worries. but as i walked through the campus, surrounded by hundreds of other students carrying the exact same unspoken fatigue, i realized something important.

we are all paying a higher price to be here today than we did yesterday.

the fare has gone up, the road is bumpy, and the air is thick with diesel and doubt. but we are still getting on the ride. we are still passing each other's coins down the line. we are still making sure that everyone, no matter how tired, gets their chance to call out their stop and safely step down onto the earth.

and maybe, for nineteen, that has to be enough.