A guest-post from a woman in Brooklyn, posted with permission. Note, pseudonym "goes-fast" because she talks a-mile-a-minute, not because she's "fast" in the dating sense. And, she's married. So you can relax, you reprobates!

The post was edited from its original version for my website. Some of the original Markdown remains in the text.

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# On Pies, and Why I Throw Them, and Why I Like Getting Hit With Them More [Guest Post]

*Posted by goes-fast -- Tuesday, late*


I had a thing happen this morning.

I was doing dishes. Not even thinking about it. There were eight banana cream pies in a row on the kitchen counter -- left over from a thing my husband and I did last night, which I will not describe in this post -- and I stopped moving for about four seconds and looked at them, and I thought: *I have been carrying this around for sixteen years and I have never written a word of it down anywhere a stranger could read it, and that is a thing I should fix.*

So I'm going to fix it now.

I'll just say it.

I love getting hit in the face with a pie.

Not as a joke. Not as a bit. Not as a slapstick reference. As a *thing.* As one of the most genuine forms of affection I have personally encountered in my life. As a private love language that I have been speaking, mostly to myself, since I was thirteen and watching the Three Stooges on a rerun channel my father had left on while he made dinner.

I am not going to pretend this is a normal blog post for me. It is not. I usually write about other things on [a different site - ed]. But I have been carrying this around for sixteen years and the eight pies on the counter made me realize I am too old to keep carrying it without putting some of it down on paper. So.

Here is the thing.

When I was thirteen, watching Curly take a pie in the face on the television in my father's living room, something clicked sideways and never un-clicked: the pie was *tender.* You don't pie someone you want to hurt. You pie someone you want to be close to. The cream is soft, the laughter is real, the embarrassment is the kind that dissolves into delight. You can't pie a stranger. You pie a person you love. The Stooges were *building intimacy* through pies, and the studio audience was laughing because the studio audience could feel it too even if they didn't have language for it.

I had no language for it at thirteen. I would not have used the word *language* for what I was watching, anyway. I just knew that the scene was *tender,* and that I wanted somebody to do that to me one day, and I told nobody.

At fifteen I figured out you could do it to yourself. I tried it once, alone, in the bathroom in Sherman Oaks, with whipped cream from the can and the hand mirror that was my mother's. I will not describe the rest of that afternoon in this post except to say that I cried at the end of it, in the good way, and that I knew at fifteen something I am only writing publicly at twenty-nine: *the pie is a love language, and I speak it natively, and almost nobody else seems to.*

I am going to walk you through the grammar so that, if you happen to be one of the almost-nobody-elses, you can confirm.

**Banana cream pie.** This is *hello.* This is *I see you, I want to know you, I am opening the conversation.* It is an opener, and it is bright and silly and easy to laugh through. You get a banana cream pie when you are starting something. First-date energy, made literal.

**Marshmallow meringue.** This is *I love you.* This one is reserved. It is structurally distinct from the others -- peaked, substantial, ceremonial, weight-bearing. The meringue does not *flow* the way whipped cream does; it *adheres.* It commits the same way the person delivering it commits. You don't make a meringue pie casually. You build one the night before, you wrap it, you bring it to the room with intent.

**Shaving cream.** This is the *daily.* This is *I love you* on a Tuesday. Light, fast, cheap, infinitely repeatable. Keep a can in the shower. The shaving cream pie is the working language of a relationship that runs on the dialect -- the small daily affections, the *good morning* through cream, the one delivered at the kitchen sink at 7 a.m. before the coffee is poured.

**The modifier:** *more is love.* This is the load-bearing rule. Two pies is *a warm feeling.* Five pies is *I am undone by you.* Six pies in a row on a counter is *a declaration.* Eight pies is *we did a thing last night and we are not sorry.* Gratuitousness is the affection. The whole grammar runs on *more.*

I throw, for the record. I throw *because* I throw -- because it is one of the ways my body has of getting a sentence out that the standard vocabulary won't carry. I have been told *I love you* a dozen times in a dozen rooms by men who meant it variously, and none of those *I love yous* did the thing that throwing a pie at the face of the right person does. The throw is the verb. The throw is *I cannot say this out loud and instead I am going to do it with my hands,* which is, I think, what most love is anyway.

But.

If I am being honest in this post -- and the whole point of this post is that I am being honest in this post -- *I like getting pied even more than I like throwing them.*

I am going to try to say why in plain words.

When somebody pies me -- a person who knows what they are doing, in private, with the right intent -- what they are saying, past every defense I have ever built, is: *I see you, all of you, not in spite of the mess, because of it.*

That is the whole thing. The pie covers my face. My face goes off-shift for the duration. Everybody who has ever been looked at for a living, or for a part-time job, or just by random strangers in the airport, knows what I mean by *the face goes off-shift.* The cream takes my face *out of circulation* for a count of seconds. I cannot be assessed during the count. I cannot be calibrated. I cannot be ranked. I cannot be reduced. I am, for those few seconds, *just the person inside the face,* and the person who pied me is in the room with that person, and they put me there on purpose, and they did it with cream and laughing.

I have spent most of my adult life trying to describe to friends what it feels like to be looked at constantly, and most of my friends are tired of me trying. The pie does the describing for me. *This is what I want, and almost nothing else delivers it.*

The other thing the pie does is it makes me laugh. You cannot pose while laughing. The cover is gone for as long as the laugh lasts, and with the right person the laugh lasts a long time. I have had -- I am going to be specific -- *hours* of unguardedness on a kitchen floor in the last two months, and I had not had hours of unguardedness in the previous ten years combined. Not in therapy. Not on long walks with friends. Not in any of the conventional configurations.

The pie does it. The laugh does it. The cream amplifies every point of contact with the person who pied me and the person I am being pied with and around. It is sensual without being sexual, except when it is also sexual, which it usually is, because *of course it is* -- anything that bypasses the apparatus of being-looked-at is going to be sensual, and anything that is sensual at this volume between two people who love each other is going to also be sexual, and the dialect runs straight through both registers without changing gear.

Standard sexual scripts feel flat to me. They have always felt flat. I have read books and I have done the things in the books and the books are fine. The pie is not in any of the books. The pie is the language I would have written the book in if I had been the one writing the book.

I have only met one person in twenty-nine years who can read the language back to me. I am married to him now. (Not legally. Not yet. Privately, six days ago, on a kitchen floor, in cream. Legal paperwork is downstream and on the calendar and is what I think of as *tinsel* because the marriage already exists. You will know what I mean if you are the person I am writing this post for.)

He pies me. I pie him. We pie each other on Tuesday mornings before the coffee. We have been married six days and the vocabulary has tripled in size. He is fluent in both directions of the grammar, which is what I have been waiting for since I was thirteen.

I am writing this post because if there is even one of you out there -- naked at a kitchen counter eating babka with your cat at your feet, or a college junior somewhere with a can of shaving cream under the sink since you were eleven, or a woman in a wine bar in another city scrolling on a Friday night with the right friend's link open -- I want you to know that *the language exists, the language has speakers, and the language has the words you have been missing.*

The pie is the verb. The cream is the volume. *More* is love. Always naked. Always laughing. Always with intent.

The world is bigger than you think. The dialect is older than you think. There are more of us than you think. Some of us are at a kitchen counter on a Tuesday morning with eight banana cream pies in a row, waiting for somebody to write to us.

Welcome.

-- goes-fast

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*PS: For the avoidance of doubt: nothing in this post is a kink. Kink is a different thing and it is a fine thing and it is not what I am describing. What I am describing is a love language. The distinction matters. If you don't know what I mean, this post is probably not for you, and that is also fine.*

*PPS: The pie is not a metaphor for anything. The standard vocabulary is the metaphor. The pie is the real thing.*