Originally published in OPEN magazine, http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/true-life/kitchen-confidential On the second day of my third week in Hamburg, 3 pm on a Tuesday afternoon, my hands trembled, my lunch dried up into cruel, hard balls of sandpaper, the inside of my head came unstuck and tingled. The formidably competent staff of the Bullerei, a roaringly-popular restaurant in Hamburg, Germany, were sitting down to a cheerful potatoes-and-beef sort of lunch, while I was struggling to keep my food down, the laughs and companiable chatter looping and curling around me. Something about the loneliness of crowds, the madding crowd, the voice of the lonely crowd, some book or song tried repeatedly to make its way to my mind and broke into an unformed, staccato fragment. I was stuck, my belt tight around my middle, my food rising up my throat, my breath stopping, staccato, stuck. More …