What could be more fragile?

This is a poetic piece of writing developed through a collaborative exploration of the word ‘fragility’. Our aim was to create a text that held onto the makeshift quality of being in conversation, and which reflected the textures of a live exchange between friends. Language is a meeting place, and ours formed itself in the space between our respective homes in Lebanon and Scotland – our words becoming a fragile yet immediate bridge between the two countries. We explore how the word ‘fragility’ resonated with our day-to-day lives, in particular against backdrops of war, the death of a loved one, bringing up children, precarious living and the value of friendship. Using a shared document, we took turns to write and then cut into each other’s words, moving both backwards and forwards through the text. Some parts were deleted, others developed, and the process was one of playfully making and un-making. To be fragile can be understood as being vulnerable, but there is also something visceral, hopeful, deeply and powerfully felt, in the way fragility continues to exist in a world that can so easily destroy it.