The Best of Curses: The Pain of Glimpses into Heaven and the Torment of Hell

There are moments in life that cling to us, moments so visceral and raw that they carve themselves into the deepest recesses of our memory. They are not always moments of joy—sometimes they are moments of profound pain, of longing, of a glimpse into something beautiful that we know we can never hold onto. Ekko, from Arcane, knows this pain. His eyes, heavy with sadness, reflect a man who had heaven in his hands and chose to let it slip away. Powder, too, caught a fleeting glimpse of something pure, something whole, only to watch it dissolve into the chaos of their fractured world.

This is the story of those glimpses—the brief, blinding flashes of heaven that leave us forever changed, forever yearning. And it begs the question: what happens to those who never get that glimpse? Those who sit in the quiet corners of existence, aching for something they cannot name, some rewriting their stories, others ending them before they’ve truly begun.

The Luxury of Loss

There is a strange luxury in loss, in knowing that you’ve tasted something divine, even if it was fleeting. To preserve every detail of that moment in your memory, to etch it so deeply that it becomes a part of you, is both a blessing and a curse. It’s the best of curses, really—to know that you’ll never get it back, to carry the weight of that absence like a badge of honor.

But isn’t it also a blessing for things to never happen at all? For the moments that were never meant to be, that never had the chance to wound us so deeply? Perhaps. Yet, the human heart is a stubborn thing. It yearns, it aches, it fantasizes about what could have been. And in that yearning, we find both our destruction and our creation.
Love, Hate, and the Spaces Between

What is hatred, then? Pure hatred? Is it like ice and fire, locked in an eternal dance where love and hate destroy each other, leaving no victor? Or is it something more insidious, a shadow that grows in the spaces where love once stood? Human misunderstanding runs so deep, so confusing, that we impose our desires, our fears, our pain onto others, searching for meaning in the chaos.

What is the common ground between friend and enemy? Is it the shared pain, the shared longing, the shared glimpses into something greater than ourselves? And what is the best and the worst of it all? The curse we bear is not just the pain itself, but the addiction to it—the way our minds wander, replaying what could have been, killing us in every moment.

The Secret to Greatness—or Madness?

Is this pain the secret to greatness? Does it demand the sacrifice of sanity, of everything human, in exchange for something transcendent? Or is it just another human fantasy, our desire to possess, to claim victories, to make sense of the senseless? Perhaps it’s both. Perhaps it’s neither.

This pain, this torment, is it love or war? Is it a fundamental question that drives us mad, that makes us do all sorts of crazy things? It impacts us, whether we admit it or not. It pushes us to the edge, forcing us to confront the parts of ourselves we’d rather ignore. And yet, there’s a strange comfort in it, isn’t there? A joy in self-torture, in admitting that we like things this way, that we revel in the chaos because it makes us feel alive.
What Comes of Pain?

So, what comes out of such deep pain? Does it build something beautiful, something lasting? Or does it simply destroy, leaving us hollow and aching? For some, it’s the spark that ignites greatness—a willingness to sacrifice everything for a moment of transcendence. For others, it’s a slow unraveling, a descent into madness.

And yet, there’s something undeniably human about it. We are creatures of contradiction, of love and hate, of creation and destruction. We lose our minds in the pursuit of meaning, but perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps the way out is not to escape the pain, but to embrace it, to let it shape us, to let it remind us that we are alive.

Tormented Joy

Ekko and Powder’s story is not just theirs—it’s ours. It’s the story of every person who has ever caught a glimpse of heaven and chosen to return to hell. It’s the story of those who have never seen the light, but feel its absence all the same. It’s the story of pain, of memory, of the best of curses.

So, let us sit with it. Let us feel the weight of it. Let us ask ourselves: Are we losing our minds here? Is there a way out? Or do we, deep down, prefer it this way—the joy of self-torture, the torment of being human?

Perhaps the answer lies not in escaping the pain, but in learning to live with it, to let it remind us of the richness of our existence. After all, to have felt deeply, to have loved and hated and yearned and lost, is to have lived. And isn’t that, in the end, the most beautiful curse of all?

Here’s the link to the song.