My own personal narrative arc? by Phyliss

1) It's not the reader's business. 

2) I don't have a narrative arc, ok? I am a working gal who just got caught up in trans-special linguistics and, as we all know, it was only a fluke of nature that made me the only person on our surface who can make sense of some of these texts. 

3) I am the same as I have always been. When I was born, as a baby, I was smaller, but emotions? Then and now? Exactly the same. I am more skilled at managing them only. A skill learned through a lifetime is not a narrative arc. I have never been entitled enough to have one perhaps. Being able to make the big mistakes, the big hits, to be earth changing. To have a fatal flaw. I and you? We were both born fatally flawed and with any luck and lack of horror we'll die, and die flawed.

4) What I learned or what you should learn, if learning actually does have to be done here, should be about what I learned about the world, people. 

5) Like Jesus, I lived passionately and overconfidently. On both our parts, that was hot. 

6) My life was not an arc of unknowing and then knowing or not being and becoming or being enslaved and then free or some kind of freak as in Flowers for Algernon or Valley of the Dolls or Death in Venice. 

7) You will not be privy to my narrative arc unless I write an autobiography, which I won't. I may, however, write more texts in which the narrative arc is completely missing maybe because this is adult shit and not Cliff's Notes. 

8) This is some real life, baby, not a parable or or a tract or some national hegemony myth. 

9) I would tell you the same stories from a bar stool or on a massage table, in the same way, and you'd be laughing your ass off or crying, so I don't need no stinkin' narrative arc.