Do you have a good intuitive grasp of what a pipe is?   It is an inter-process communication mechanism, really, and it can show-up in the file system and can be treated as “a file” in the sense that you can read from it and write to it.   The trick is, one process can write to it while another process is reading from it, and the data passes between them with automatic buffering graciously provided by the operating system.   (They call it a pipe, but I think of it more as a flexible, inflatable hose.)

Please excuse me if you should (quite erroneously) think that I am being condescending.   That is absolutely not my intent.