Future Islands’ “City’s Face”

Earlier this fall, I walked away from my dream. After successfully relocating to Toronto not two years earlier, I moved back to the States. See, I was born in the city, but as I’d often quip by way of explanation, I never got to live there as an adult. I tried. Goodness, I tried. In fact, I tried for so many years it easily became the unspoken goal of my life.

Then I got it. I got my dream and walked away.

I have my reasons, though moving back to the US only to face a second Trump presidency wasn’t one of them. It looks naive in retrospect, but I thought the country had learned its lesson after 2016. There was no way it would make that mistake again, especially if the concern about Biden’s senility made so many voters hesitate. When Harris took over the nomination, Trump easily moved into the “declining old guy” bracket. But boy was I wrong.

Before that horrifying turn, there was another. Sometime in early spring, my long covid symptoms worsened. For a prolonged time, it felt as though I was living just to survive, getting through one workday to rest so I could make it through another. Here I’d moved to a big, spirited city and couldn’t take advantage of it. If anything, the size of it—the density, I mean—was a threat, posing a consistent risk of reinfection. I continued masking when I went out, but masking only does so much if no one else follows suit.

At some point, I started thinking about where I might be better suited to live. In moving to Toronto, I never imagined I’d face that question again. Toronto was supposed to be it: my forever home. But once I allowed myself to begin imagining what a new life prioritizing health and safety could look like, the momentum took over. Somewhere small—not just a medium-sized city. And since I’m still working, I didn’t want to relegate myself to the middle of nowhere in case I ever lost my remote job and had difficulty finding another one. Being in the vicinity of one of the more employable cities seemed smart.

I booked a trip to the Hudson Valley and as soon as I arrived, something lifted. For starters, the population density was a micro-fraction of what I faced in Toronto. Walking down a street that wasn’t teeming with other people felt incredible. Having the space to maneuver through my day was a gift. And then there was all that nature—mountains, rivers, trees. Endless trees. I won’t attempt to explain it, except to say that the decision existed beyond language—in some rooted part of myself I’ve been slowly learning to hear.

But in the flurry of all that activity, I don’t think I ever properly processed what it meant to give up Toronto. Future Islands‘ “City’s Face,” from their 2020 album As Long As You Are, helps explain some of it. It’s a reserved song compared to the cliff-leaping flights so many of the band’s other tracks typically take. Lead singer Samuel Thompson Herring’s voice, normally a growling current of energy, sounds almost stoic. The emotions have all been wrought already.

Using a pentatonic scale, the opening synths, peppered softly with a backing electric guitar, brim with nostalgia. I hear in those initial moments the promise of what a city can hold, but it’s a hope recounted from the rearview mirror. A dream at best. Herring sings, “All those years/ Just a shadow/ Of a ghost/ Of a memory, at most.”

“City’s Face” is an enigmatic tale about needing to leave a city after a relationship comes to a brutal close. “I grew to hate you/ And this place too,” Herring shares. Falling in love with a person can set the backdrop of your existence ablaze, but when your connection ends, it can mute or altogether sour what it means to walk those same streets. When fresh ghosts haunt you at every turn, finding a new way forward becomes arduous. Sometimes leaving is best.

The lyrics aren’t an exact one-to-one experience, as some songs can be, but there are large brush strokes that feel applicable to my own canvas. “This city I’m sick and tired/ And wild/ The city that I came to love/ I’m leaving/ Filled with paranoia inside/ Trust left with the loss of my pride/ I say, ‘so long,'” Harris sings with deep resignation.

Leaving Toronto behind wasn’t a matter of long covid alone. That’s only part of the equation. It was also the fact that covid is still a rampant thing. In my more unconstrained fantasies, covid would be a thing you get every so often, like the flu. Certainly it wouldn’t be possible to get it multiple times a year. In that case, I could move about society the way I once did. However, the tradeoff, as it exists for me right now and likely for others in coming years, is that until the world takes appropriate measures to mitigate the spread of this virus, we have to retreat to various extents. “Strange now/ Strange now/ It’s strange,” Herring sings, softer and softer, beholden to the memory he once lived.

How very strange indeed.