Surly a single misstep shouldn’t look like this.
But now the cheese is congealed into chunky lumps and butter coats the bottom of the bowl, my lips, my tongue. 

They say that cooking (in comparison to baking) is easy because you don’t have to follow any steps, that you can wing it on your own.
Fat lot of good that advice did.
Apologies for not using the cheese grater and instead the pre-prepared cheese bought from the store, Your Majesty Alfredo, I didn’t think spending twenty minutes zesting a Parmesan rind was a good use of my time. 

Is that where I went wrong? where This, went wrong?
Not the pasta of course, but with us (with me).
I thought that we were above following the rulebook, the steps, winging it on our own.
Like clumsy birds leaving the earth behind to search for a new home. 

I should have known some elements of us were too important to look over.