Things that crossed the border and things that didn't

I left Minsk in August 2021 with a single suitcase, which is a sentence I've written in about seven different ways in the essays I've been working on for three years now, and I'm not sure any of the versions are right yet. I work as a software engineer in Warsaw now. The work is good and the city has been generous and there is a Belarusian community here that keeps the language alive in a way the situation at home currently does not allow. I go to a reading group that meets in an apartment near Plac Zbawiciela on the second Saturday of every month. We read and sometimes we read things written by members and sometimes we argue. The fiction I write is not allegory. I have no patience for that kind of distance. It is set in Minsk, in a neighbourhood I know well, in a period starting in 2019, and it follows three people whose lives touch obliquely. I know how it ends. Getting to the ending honestly is the problem I've been working on. The essay I finished last year is the most direct thing I've written. It was published in a Polish-Belarusian literary journal and I'm still not sure if I wanted people to read it.