Stay Still

9:58pm | April 13^th  2026

One: Partly Cloudy

I’m not a writer every day or even on most days for that matter. Most days I’m staring at the sky, wondering how many clouds it takes for a day to be considered partly cloudy. Most days I am thoughtless and perfectly free from feeling as intensely as I used to. Most days I’m floating across the greenscreen backdrop of life, as ordinary as anyone else. Some days that’s where I want to be. I want to down a redbull on the lazy thoughtless days and get a month’s worth of work done in advance. I want the privilege of time, the privilege of thinking.

Two: Stay Still

A wide-eyed girl taps her feet to the beat playing in her father’s grocery store. She holds on to her knee, pressing it towards the ground. Her feet’s still tapping perfectly in sync. Sweat accumulates at her hairline as strands of hair loosen from her ponytail. She’s still wearing her school uniform and the fan across from her blows hot air in her face. The store is full of thick dense air. She turns towards her father, hand on her knee and asks how everyone manages to stay still.

“Stay still?”

“Stay still even though there’s music on.”

He doesn’t understand. More precisely, he doesn’t know. Much like the young girl herself.

She doesn’t know the name of the song or the instruments or why she’s drawn to the combination of these elements like a moth to a flame. She’d later learn that the sound of tabla is what causes her feet to tap on the floor. She finds that it excites her, a rhythm transcending music itself. Intonations within the singers voice, sharing stories with her before she could fully understand the language.

She tells her father she’s going upstairs to get a box of mango juice. Upstairs is darker and brilliantly protected from the summer sun. She can still hear the music and she starts to spin.

Twirling in circles. One after the other. She’s not sure how her feet find a way to maintain balance but she feels a sense of control over her entire being. Weirdly enough she also feels outside of herself. The young wide-eyed girl is no longer herself. All of a sudden she can imagine herself in gold jewelry and an extravagant lehenga, her arms full of chunky bangles.

She moves like a dancer would, and in this fraction of a moment she wonders what dancers must think about while dancing. What does one feel in the middle of spinning across the room? Arms spread out towards the sky.

She has transcended herself and met with a force stronger than anything else she knows. All this spinning has placed her heart somewhere outside of herself. She’s flown away with it.

When she finally stops, silence fills the dark room. Her stomach in knots. Arms swaying by her side. Hair undone. Exhales heavy. World spinning.

She moves to the corner of the room, pulls a box of juice from the carton. Her walk is immediate, almost robotic. By the time she walks down the stairs she’s lost the way she was twirling and gliding across the air like silk just moments ago.

She’s much older now. Much older. Her foot doesn’t tap to the music in grocery stores anymore. Or anywhere. She barely hears the beat. She moves statically, across the greenscreen backdrop of the yellow green blue Earth.

She no longer questions how people can manage to stay still to the music. She’s the most still of them all.

Three: Do Not Marry Someone You Can Live With

Marry someone you can not live without.

1. ^ SFU Commencement Speech by Dr. Azra Raza, which also happens to be my most watched video on YouTube. It would be an understatement to say that I’m deeply inspired by her work and my post today is inspired by my reflection on this speech and the following ideas/opinions about art.

Not just art, but also regarding the question of how to live a meaningful life and what that even means. How to not do what you can, but do what you can’t not.

2. The lines: “You can have something special inside you, but still go nowhere with it,” and “talent is not a prize, but a possibility” from artist Rashmeet Kaur
3. Who Are You? You Need An Artists Statement. A YouTube video by Vanessa Aldrich that made it impossible for me to sit still and not make art for another day in my life. I highly recommend watching this if you want to get in touch with your creative side after years of abandoning it. One of my takeaways from this video: You need to get weirder. I love that.
4. Lastly, this subway take: There’s Too Much Art and There’s Too Many Artists. While I don’t 100% agree or disagree, I found this to be a compelling and highly relevant take.

Sincerely,

Mahnoor | Metacog Moon | Moon Book: Entry 2

Mahnoor’s Note: As always, thank you so much for taking out the time to read this piece. Below is a sneak peak into the process behind this entry for those who are curious. My two attempts to write this entry differ greatly from one another in their structure. While one entry is written in prose (part one) the other is an informal collection of thoughts and ideas (part three), I used these pieces to write a fictional scene that depicts the emotions I want to elicit without blatantly saying them (part tw0). For creatives that struggle with choosing a specific category to write or express themselves in I’d recommend trying a number of outlets and even expressing yourself in combinations of them. I believe it’s a beautiful thing if ideas do not come to us complete, coherent and in a linear way. An amalgamation of genres could allow us to convey emotions and ideas in a more authentic manner. Below are some examples of these formats within my journal, The Moon Book. If you liked this post, please consider sharing!