dichotomy ; gawsten

fifty

I guess the elephant in the room is best addressed first; I thought it could wait for a while, but I, like I'm sure the rest of the world, am so curious about Geoff Wigington's new hair color. It's the first time he's done much of anything to it, really, and he definitely started off with a bang.

What frames his face is now black, strands that are significantly shorter than they once were, no longer reaching past his ears and gathering close to shoulder-length. The back is clean and the sides are shorter, parted on his right, with a longer piece stretching down into his eyes.

He doesn't seem all that used to it yet. I watch him reach back to tuck it behind his ear multiple times, in the span of only a few minutes, as he moves swiftly around the kitchen to pull glasses from cabinets and switch on the – "old as hell", he chuckles, coffee maker.

When I ask him why he hasn't bothered to replace it yet, he stops where he is and turns to me with the widest smile on his face. "Awsten." He doesn't elaborate and I wonder if that's somewhere I really should be going just yet; Awsten Knight, the illustrious new entry into Geoff Wigington's life, is just about all the world can talk about, right now.

Since they began the band, both at the age of 21, Geoff Wigington and bandmate Jawn Rocha have been on a constant roller coaster ride of progress. An album a year, with tours to follow each, culminating in sold out rooms of hysterical teenagers that scream the lyrics back each night. It sounds great on paper, but when I ask Geoff how he's enjoyed it, he hesitates.

He rests both hands on the counter behind him and exhales heavily. "It hasn't been the best. This year...I don't know. I guess...there's a lot that happens behind closed doors, you know? A lot the fans don't know. And the media loves to fuck with the story and make me look like an asshole."

The twenty six year old singer has had more than his fair share of spotlight this year, for reasons far from pleasant. Following his first suicide attempt, back in May, he spent about a month in a treatment facility, before immediately resuming the tour, determined to make it to every city they needed to cancel on when he ended up in the hospital. That continued until mid-September, as the band made it through all of Asia, Europe, and then finished up the final leg of the run in North America, specifically, Houston, Texas, the city both bandmates call home.

The final show, Geoff says, was a lot for him. "It was kinda like- I didn't really feel better. After I got out of rehab, you know? The world talks up those kinds of places, and for good reason, but sometimes...you say the right thing and act the right way and they don't know you're still hurting."

He explains to me what the subsequent tour became, post-rehab, "it was like, a stopper, for all my shit. Plugged everything up with the tour, and sleeping on the bus and flying to new places every couple weeks, and everything was so busy...I started to kinda, rely on that, I guess? Being busy instead of being sad. It didn't really hit me until the last night that my time was up."

With the conclusion of this tour, slated to go back on the road in less than a month, Geoff was scrambling. He was back in a world he didn't quite know how to navigate; the stopper had been forcefully unplugged and everything was hitting him, all at once. It was finally time for him to deal, to feel, again, and he'd just about forgotten what that meant.

This year has brought a lot of changes for Geoff, including, the end to his four-year long relationship with filmmaker Chloe Kristensen. When I ask him about it, he's silent, for a few moments. "I love her," he says, finally. "Just not in the way either of us deserves. She deserves someone who'll love her the way I can't, and I...I deserve...I deserve to be honest about my feelings."

And honest he's decided to be; as he walks me around the apartment he now shares with his new boo, he explains that it wasn't him, who ended the relationship with Chloe. "She knew I wasn't happy. She'd known for a while, I guess. And then- she saw how happy I was, with Aws, and how it was different, with him, and I think that's why she decided to break things off."