Walking streets I haven't seen

I'm from Kharkiv and I have been in Frankfurt for two years and I write in Ukrainian because the language is the thing I carried that hasn't changed. I work as a software engineer here, mostly remote, for a German company, and my German is functional and my life in Frankfurt is ordinary in a way I don't take for granted. My neighbourhood is Sachsenhausen. I walk along the Main most evenings and there is nothing wrong with that walk and it is not the walk I want to take. The fiction I write is set in Kharkiv. I know the Kholodna Hora neighbourhood where I grew up. I know the university district. I know what Sumska Street looks like at different times of year and the specific smell of the metro at rush hour and the bakery near Heroiv Pratsi that has been there since before I was born. I write these things in Ukrainian as a form of presence, not as elegy. The city is still there. I write as if I'm walking through it because that's the closest I can get. I've published three short stories in an online Ukrainian literary journal. I don't know if they're good. I know they're necessary.