Fragile

Words are devious, I'm sure you have noticed. They start life as a means to communicate, simple and straight forward. Then, like a game, were are introduced to those that look similar but sound different (dough, chough, cough, bough) and those that sound the same but look dissimilar (stare, stair, stir or pour, paw but not poor - no one said English was easy). So we learn to read and suddenly those squiggles on the page acquire the power to draw pictures in our imagination. A magic world, just for us and so we read and read and slowly we come to realise the subtlety of the words themselves.
Take fragile. Can't you just hear the tinkling fracture of destruction? For inanimate objects it usually means break, destroy, end, but for the animate it can be a bit more complicated. It can refer to a physical, emotional or psychological state. It may not be an end in itself but an ongoing process for which the result is uncertain. Flowers are fragile as they fade and die, but a person in a fragile state may be in a dark place from which they would return.

And then there are fossils, what was once animals, plants, footsteps in the sand, now fixed in stone.
Stone, fragile? And yet along the coast where these fossils are found, erosion from the sea and weather is slowly wearing them down, washing them away.

So perhaps fragile is just a way to describe a state of flux - like glass; looks like one thing (a solid) but is another (a liquid). Sounds a bit like Life, hmm?