On my last visit to Payawan, Balo-i, Lanao del Norte and Radapan, Piagapo, Lanao del Sur, I remember how the road itself seemed to prepare me for the question.

From the city, the highway begins plainly enough: Roadside life unfolding. But as it cuts through Balo-i, the road seems to narrow in width and mood. It asks you to slow down.

You know Payawan is near when the roadside stores begin selling bakas, dried tuna laid out like provisions and markers. There is now a roundabout in Balo-i, a modest sign of order. Beyond it, the road feels less hurried.

Then comes that last exit to the right before the ascent toward Marawi. Take it and it leads toward Piagapo.

Piagapo remains calm: quiet, watchful, wrapped in stillness. Then Payawan opens with its rolling plateau, holding a steadiness I could recognize but not fully claim. Radapan is different. Its slopes seem to carry clouds that do not merely pass through, but pause and rest.

And yet, for all their beauty, I could not pretend they were home. They were alien to me. But they were not outside me.

Some places need not raise you completely to remain part and parcel of your being. Some belong to you because blood, stories and longing keep pointing there.

Perhaps identity is like that: not a clean return to one pure origin, but a continuing act of becoming. Stuart Hall helps name that kind of identity.

Payawan and Radapan may not be the answer. But they are part of the question. Manila complicates the map.

It is where my seeds were planted. My father came carrying faith, conviction, and a belief that Filipino Muslims belonged not in the margins of the republic, but within its living center.

But Manila is also a vortex. It does not ask permission. It spins, pulls and demands. You learn to move not always with grace, but with grip.

My father came here on a mission, and part of my own life began here. But Manila does not exhaust me either.

Maybe places are not sealed containers. Maybe people are not too. Doreen Massey helps me see Manila, Payawan and Radapan as different claims on one life.

What remains, then, is longing.

Not the longing to return to one homeland. Avtar Brah’s “homing desire” comes close: becoming at home with all that has made me, without assuming home must be fixed.

Once, my revered Professor Cadz Malbarosa brought me to my senses: do not chase glitter, fame, fortune, or power. Chase instead what gives stability and sustainability.

I hear his words differently now. Stability and sustainability are not merely career advice. They ask what life can stand without being consumed and what work can endure without hollowing the soul.

Maybe that is why Payawan and Radapan stayed with me.

In the rolling plateau, I saw stability. On the slopes where the clouds seemed to rest, I sensed sustainability. Perhaps I was looking at a language my life had been trying to learn.

Paul Ricoeur might call this narrative identity. I would call it more simply: The slow work of understanding why my story was written this way.

I was not born in Payawan. I was not raised in Radapan. Manila planted me, but it does not own the whole of me. My father’s mission brought our story to the center, but my own mission remains less certain.

Maybe I will find it here. Maybe elsewhere. Maybe part of the mission is the rediscovery itself: the journey back by road, memory, faith, responsibility and listening to places that remain partly alien yet necessary.

Maybe that is why the longing stays. Not to prove that I am lost.

But to remind me that the map is not finished.