Fragility of Meaning

Fragility of Meaning | Addepalli Sai Vamsi

Photo by Saras

Words strung together are called sentences. And when sentences, chained to each other, phrase fragile memories, they become stories. It is these stories that, woven together, become “life.”

But a single question remains, pulling toward itself a gnashing abyss. A stellar explosion that drowns existence as it burns in silence, an interrogation that screams. How do you weigh the words that thread the fabric of our lives?

And if you cannot even weigh the words themselves, then do those stories ever mean anything at all?

Around 326 BCE, Alexander the Great led his army into the Indus Valley, marking the easternmost edge of his conquests. He crossed the Indus river and fought King Porus at the Battle of the Hydaspes.

But did Alexander, brittle, taut with pride and conquest, ever foresee the dissolution that would swallow his achievements after his passing? He crossed the Indus believing he could extend his name to the edge of the earth. Which, in a way, he did. But for what? His empire fractured within years of his death. His achievements were rewritten by those who survived him. The stories of his conquests became myth, their meaning shifting with every retelling.

Alexander was a man caught navigating the gaping maw of a beast that preys on humanity: meaning. But meaning, like an empire, is fragile. It survives not in marble or in victory, but in the trembling breath of those who dare to remember.

This is not the only instance where the river of time has drowned what was thought immortal. Again and again, the grand reigns of divine kings are caught in the river’s bends and sink to the bottom, their great meanings drifting downstream until they fall off the edge of memory.

The Ming dynasty. The Ottoman Empire. The Aztec Empire. The Holy Roman Empire. Each sought to impose order, to give decay the illusion of a framework human attempts to immortalize their existence. To preserve what gave their lives meaning through colossal institutions. Yet each has survived only as haunted ruins, museum relics, or the ink-stained sorrow of archaeological reports.

What we consider permanent or valuable today may perish tomorrow. That is the truth of meaning: it lasts only as long as the reader doesn’t turn the page.

And still, we are humans after all.

We will continue to stumble along the roots of a forest floor coated in rotting leaves, searching for a road, hopelessly lost. We will paint our skins in glorious purpose, if only to find other travelers in the dark.

Because we are only human, after all, holding onto the last breaths of our meaning, because without it we’d lose sight of ourselves.

Because we are cages crafted of water, holding a flame that longs to burn brighter. A flame called purpose. A flame called meaning. The vapors of our being lost to the void.

And yet, we continue: our bleeding pens scratching at the wall of eternity. We dare time to forget, and still attempt to carve our marks into stone.

So what if we cannot weigh words?

So what if we never know whether our stories truly mean anything at all?

That’s the beauty, isn’t it? Of a fragile creature afraid to bear the weight of immortality.

Perhaps meaning lies not in certainty, but in our persistent desire to seek it. And no matter how fragile, perhaps the drifting fragments will be caught by someone along the line.

And maybe, just maybe, the broken pieces of our purposes will light the fire of another’s soul.