I have been in flower school, again, the last week – and will be there all this week, too. At the end of every class I walk, with a big bag in my hand full of the things I have made, all the way up the South Circular Road to the office I have begun to rent a desk in since the start of the year. I have been leaving the things I make around the place – the handtied bouquet full of lilies and gerberas and leatherleaf, the bridal teardrop made of individually wired dust-pink orchids, the wreath that pops with pink roses, September flower and baby’s breath – the button-hole corsages are nestled into a typewriter by the window. Even the crucifix covered in white chrysanthemums and Memory Lane roses has a home. As I write, the four of the women I share the space with are silent, headphones in, focused on the things they are making. Scout the dog sits in her bed, tiny and dark-eyed. When I came in, I found that my wreath had been hung high in the windowsill on a hook – my heart lifted a little at the sight of it.

I have been fully freelance since 2015, and before that for three years in America I hopped gigs. Reception work for three months, stints at copywriting in startups, nannying, cleaning, nannying, a lush year part-time in a bookshop – all around which, I wrote. I have been very happy to work by myself these last five years – mostly working out of the library, or my house. For one of them I rented a desk in a garage on Synge Street, inhabited by five lads who make films. My desk there was a blue upright piano with the keyboard stripped out and replaced by a wooden board, I wrote facing the exposed strings, which sometimes gave off a weird, low tenor. We drank a lot of cans and smoked a lot of rollies – we listened to Lemonade, a lot, that year, too. I wrote the vast majority of Other Words For Smoke in that garage, at that piano. We made We Face This Land out of that space.

I like those lads so much, still – thought the world of them, think the world of them – but inevitably they all moved on to bigger spaces, bigger projects – freelancing is like that. People move. It was important, mostly, to me, to be in a place with other people and after that studio shuttered, I felt like it would never happen again. I closed up, too or something – tightened, became more self-sufficient. Allowed friendships to drift, or come apart. Stopped collaborating. Had an injury, which combined with treatment defined much of my solitude for almost a entire year. I look at my life as a freelancer and think of how it all nearly fell apart when I fell apart. I knew I had to get back to working around people. I was lucky enough to get into residencies in universities and libraries, but in those roles you are always an outsider – a visiting artist, an observer. I liked that, too – after you have spent a long time on the outside, you get cosier there than within any structure, any team. I have always struggled with structure – as anyone who I worked with in that gorgeous bookshop will tell you – so finding a rhythm with other people in a work environment has grown harder and harder for me. I am set in my ways. I hate to be enough of a cliché to say that I’m a lone wolf, but catch me on the rock gazing up at the moon, my coat dappled in snow, my paws enormous but somehow, still, adorable.

This life without traditional structure is what led, I think, the internet to become my structure – a framework to make me feel as though I am part of the world, when my everyday movements largely have removed me from it. Micro-routines, ongoing communication with people – all of it provided by the never-ending presence of the internet. A cosy basket for this lone wolf to curl up in, like Scout, there in the corner. I use Twitter instead of coffee-breaks, instead of a water-cooler and Whatsapp instead of lunches out and pints after the work is done. It has become a placebo for a real life and I am still here, nearly twenty five columns deep, maybe an inch closer to the bottom of this problem. I still have a tricky relationship with this other world, but I feel better about it, like maybe I have the upper hand now, though that hand is still wrapped around the too-big flatness of my phone.

Look, I am not trying to say that human contact might have been the answer all along but I am saying that since I began to take part in this space I have started to feel more human, instead of like some approximation of a person taking part from an emotional remove. In a recent column about Tokyo, I mentioned that I had been feeling – well, for the want of a better word, better. That better hasn’t gone away with being home. It wasn’t just the strange lift of being abroad, though that may have tipped the first domino. I sat down to write this column about my continued terror over the epidemic, but rather, found myself looking at this bright room and feeling a halo of something good. Looking at my wreath on the wall and thinking, I made that, and one of you hung it somewhere it would be beautiful, right in the window, right in the light.

So much of the trouble I have is around a sense of aloneness, and a consistent inability to gauge what kind of closeness is helpful, and what kind of closeness is suffocating. I don’t have that answer yet, but I do have today, when I walked into a room full of flowers and felt for a second that I was part, maybe, of a pack.