![]() When I moved there, I had wanted to be an artist too. They were impossible not to know if you lived in Richmond, a small city that prided itself on being the artsy part of Virginia. Murals occupied a relatively small amount of his working time-they were completed in a few exhausting days-but they were what people knew. I never understood this, but if I’d spent hundreds of hours tracing tiny lines with an X-Acto knife, then I, too, would have to look down upon the alternative. There are machines that can replicate this result infinitely quicker, but he looked upon them with disdain. The map was cut in the shape of a leaf the canals converged into veins. ![]() Murals weren’t the only thing he made-he directed the occasional music video and had once appeared in the Daily Mail holding a disturbingly intricate hand-cut map of Amsterdam, where his family was from and where he lived half the year. ![]() I’d decided beforehand that I wouldn’t ask about his murals. In his studio, he told me I could ask him anything. Once, he asked what my type was, romantically, and the only unifying factor I could find between the people I had slept with was that a disproportionate number of them had jumped into frozen ponds for absolutely no reason at all. There was no heat and no air conditioning, and I always suspected that, even if other families had offered other studios, he would have chosen this one anyway. He used the pointed ends of finished X-Acto blades to pin photos to the wall. The studio was a small room, layered in indecipherable spray-painted phrases. A family had offered him the carriage house above their garage for free, and in return, he gifted them black-and-white paintings of birds. I found more images of her while I sat in his studio. The first time I saw him, a year or two before we began dating, he was painting daisies in her hair. She looked out sideways, lips parted as if she were about to speak. The Rumpus is a literary barn-raising, where our writers, editors, illustrators, and readers are all indispensable to who we are.The thing about living with my ex’s mural of his own ex about two hundred feet from my apartment was that I loved it. We also hope you’ll contribute to The Rumpus by submitting your writing (check our Writer’s Guidelines) to keep our pages filled with goodness. ![]() And please sign up to receive our free overly personal newsletter, too! We believe that literature is community-and if reading The Rumpus makes you want more, we’ve got more! Sign up to participate in the Rumpus Book Club, Rumpus Poetry Book Club, Letters in the Mail, and Letters for Kids-each of these programs helps to keep The Rumpus in existence. We want to introduce you to authors you’ve never heard of before and to provide perspective on books, films, and media that will make you look deeper. In January 2017, The Rumpus was purchased by Marisa Siegel, who had previously served as Managing Editor from 2014–2017. We work to shine a light on stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power. We strive to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere, and to lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers we love. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how. At The Rumpus, we know how easy it is to find pop culture on the internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path.
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