Double Feature: Noor

Reflections & photos from a birthday scene from Noor. (Content: blood, needles, food, religious play)

This is only one side of the story. If you’d like to read Deena’s perspective please enjoy the post “Double Feature: Deena”

---

We stop mid-action and look at each other. I’m holding a hot glue gun, while Deena has an 18-gauge needle and a birthday candle.

“…I think we’ve made this more complicated than it needs to be.”

Huge grins cut across our faces and we laugh. Our plan was to hot glue the candle to the hub of the needle to keep it secure when punctured through my forehead. We decide to just melt it directly to the needle, no hot glue required.

I had just turned 33, the so called “Jesus” birthday, and wanted to do something debaucherous. 

Earlier we had explained the idea of a “crown of thorns” using needles to those that had come to watch our campout scene. I bonded with them over our various Christian childhoods and desires to make the pious profane.

In the weeks leading up to this night I had decided a crown of thorns, while fun and bound to be bloody, wasn’t quite enough for me to feel satisfied.

“There’s one part that’s a surprise,” Deena devilishly reveals before we begin to settle in to our roles.

Deena, my favorite needle top and dear friend, asks which needle I’d like to start with. I decide on the biggest one out of the 5 needles we have planned today, the 18 g, that also has a birthday candle affixed to it by its own melted wax.

A latex covered forefinger and thumb press against my forehead, in the center, and I take a deep breath in. Slow and deliberate I hold it, waiting in anticipation, tension rippling through my body before I shake it off my shoulders.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”