the nothing that keeps us from something

As a kid, I always loved those picture things, where you're supposed to find all the differences.
And there's the one picture where everything is missing.
The one on the left, with everything in its place. And the right, where there is nothing. (Two-Headed Boy. Neutral Milk Hotel.)
We look outside, and everything is breaking. The water is too cloudy. It's April and it's ninety degrees. And everything is missing. We have no justice. It didn't snow this winter.
(Trouble Comes Running. Spoon.) The missing pieces that we lost last time we tried to fix ourselves, that someone swept under the couch or threw away. We're missing the things that no one thought were important at first. But now that they're gone, we need them again.
We're flickering, like the light in the hallway that's been flickering for months, that no one's tall enough to change.
It's because we're afraid of change. And difference. (Separator. Radiohead.)
And we're afraid of ourselves.
We can't fix anything because we can't even fix ourselves. There are some things that, for a second, can fix us. We all have something. Something that hides in between the lines, that we reach into when we can't even lift ourselves up anymore.
Something that will carry us off the the vaguely lit utopia that we've been looking for. We live in somewhat of a dystopia, but it's real. Even though the sky is blue and the clouds are perfectly white, there is too much missing. There's too much that we aren't willing to fix. And these things spiderweb together and they build up into a thick layer that blocks us from freedom. There are people that spin the spiderwebs. And there are people that try to tear them down, that want so badly to see the light on the other side.
If there is any light on the other side.
They're not sure, so they keep spinning their webs, their lies, trying (Out Go the Lights. Spoon.) to find something that makes them happy, even if it's a twisted, dark kind of happy. Even if it pushes people down beneath them.
There's always some space between those two pictures. There's a thick black line, or there's shiny-white nothingness that still separates them. And maybe there is no bad and good. Maybe everything is just something.
But something is missing. Like the righthand picture, the one that's incomplete, wrong.
And that righthand picture is us.
The flowers bloomed too early this year. They died early, too.
(Fly Trapped in a Jar. Modest Mouse.)