When did the idea of this book come to me? I can no longer remember. What I do remember is bringing the diaries from the time of my six-year on again and off again relationship to the island of Fårö in the summer of 2019 and reading them there. Something was keeping me from moving on; I was still hauntedby the relationship a year after it had officially ended. By moving through it all again in the name of art, I hoped I would make it out the other side. As I read the diaries on the island, I realised that my writing about the slow-burning beginning of the relationship struggled to hold my attention, and that there was no good way to tell the full story without also exposing relationships I hadhad with other men. We had not existed in a vacuum.

                [...]

Abisko lives in me as well. The northern lights. The chess playing. The food. Less tenderness there, but not without. The New Year’s kiss right after we came in from the cold. Alone. I love him. I love being loved by him. I don’t want to believe that this could be an end. Can it? It feels so alive. So very alive. Do we have another chance? I hope so. When will my hope die? When love dies? Not now.

                [...]

My first diary was white plastic, with a photograph of an orange kitten on it.

My current diary is a hardback red.

                [...]

When do I write? On trains, by the breakfast table, in bed, in the morning, in the evening, when I hurt. Or when I am so excited about something that I want to preserve it forever.

The things written in the diary aren’t always the things I remember, or the things that keep living in my mind. In this way the diary becomes another perspective, another voice. A way to converse with yourself past the limitations of time.

I have a photographic diary too, and it’s been my primary creative practice for seventeen years. But it has got its limitations. You have to work with the surface.

The words and photographs tell different stories of the same time. I can’t say what is closer to the truth.

Each medium has its limitations; they tell such a tiny fragment.

                [...]

Spent most of the day in an armchair. Slept. Looked at the sky.

                [...]

A new day. Snow. He wants me to engage with his anger. See his attempts to share and accept the ways in which I have stood in his way. Will try later. Breakfast first.

                [...]

On the train. New train. Melancholic.

                [...]

The first things I pointed my camera at after the break-up were flowers. I didn’t want to photograph myself or anyone else, did not want to consider a human being and their ideas about themselves. The flowers asked nothing of me, they didn’t care howI made them look.

                [...]

Wrote a kind of poem from rock bottom yesterday. About not leaving, and not letting myself leave.

                [...]

Dreamt I shat myself, it seeped into my jeans, had to wipe up. And then I was in the forest. A big mountain where I was hiding from someone. And then A and I were talking in my kitchen until I realised that Dad might be there and could hear everything. But how had he gotten in? I called out: Dad! And he answered.

                [...]

I had a box of my great grandfather Ignas Scheynius’s photographs. I had found it in my grandfather’s apartment when cleaning out after his death, and I’d committed to putting on an exhibition with these photographs in Ignas’ home country of Lithuania. He is an important figure in Lithuanian history, both for his work in politics and his novels, but these photos had never been shown. When A landed in Sweden at Christmas, for what would become our final weeks together, I had started the process of going through the photographs and was very much looking forwardto continuing the process with him. For years he had held my hand through editing, and I’d come to rely on his eyes, and his ability to tie stories together. It was as if I could see my photosbetter when his eyes were taking them in in tandem with my own. I began to struggle to rely solely on my own judgement of what was a good story. And then he broke up with me and I found myself back in London alone with these photographs. In some sense it was good that they were not my own. That thefirst thing I had to edit so close to the break-up was something that I had some distance from.But there were so many places I could go. So many different directions I could follow Ignas in. And what I found in the box was not really what the organisers of the exhibition had expected. It was mostly landscapes and family photos. Verylittle of it was political in any obvious way.

Ignas was a political refugee. He was a Lithuanian freedom fighter forced to cross the border by foot in 1940 when things got too dangerous for him in his home country. He could never return home after that; there was a death sentence that wouldbe put into action if he tried. His sister and her husband were shot by the Soviets. He continued to fight by writing books about the Russian oppression. And then he died in Stockholm in 1959.

I have his name, or the Swedish version of it, and it is always accompanied by questions about how to pronounce it and where it is from.

                [...]

The first time I went to Lithuania was when I was twenty-nine. I went to Šeiniūnai and found, in a field of tall grass, a statue of my great grandfather carved out of wood. I found thegrave of his mother in a beautiful woodland cemetery.

                [...]

Dreamt I was in charge of children on a raft, they fell into the water. I swam around to save them. There were too many children. Saw two floating in strange positions. Don’t know how I got them all out, but they were wet and it was cold and we hurried to find our way inside somewhere and find their mother.

                [...]

(The person who has access to your body better be awake, better be grateful, better be curious, better be listening. And that includes yourself. Don’t go telling stories of your body without really listening to it. You are in its hands, and it is in yours.)

                [...]

He walks past me in the dream. I pretend not to see. Then I reach out an arm for him. He’s afraid of me. He comes hesitantly. He holds me. A long hug. He’s going for a smoke. Long slim cigarettes from which he removes the filter.

                [...]

Kafka never intended to share his diaries with the world; his friend Max Brod made that decision for him after his death. In his Afterword, Brod writes:

One must in general take into consideration the false impression that every diary unintentionally makes. When you keep a diary you usually put down what is oppressive or irritating. By being put down on paper painful impressions are got rid of. Pleasant impressions for the most part do not have to be counteracted in this way; you make a note of them, as many people should know from experience, only in exceptional cases, or when (as in the case of a travel diary) it is your express purpose to do so. Ordinarily, however, diaries resemble a kind of defective barometric curve that register only the ‘lows’, the hours of greatest depression, but not the ‘highs.’

                [...]

Dreams. Amanda. Moose. Airplane en route to northern Norway with a layover somewhere. We sit in the back. Suddenly everything stops. I know we’re going to die. Short announcements on the loudspeakers. The plane still and silent. Amanda pregnant or post-partum. She finds a bucket of water and washes between her legs and her face turns red and Moose says something about how this is what it’s like when she releases anxiety.

                [...]

Bought a new diary. Not one doubt. Black. And a green pen. And pistachio-green acrylic paint.

                [...]

He steals flowers for me. A pink rose and an elderflower.

                [...]

To be moved by music, to move to music, to lie on the floor surrounded by music.

                [...]

With this letter i wish to do what i started a few weeks ago but have only been vague about so far. i want to say good luck and goodbye. And i would rather not know you at this moment in time.

                [...]

I see now that my internet modem fell down during the night without me noticing.

---

 


Order a copy of Scheynius’
Diary of an Ending
via Prototype direct.



Lina Scheynius  is a photographer known for her distinct, diaristic style of image-making. Her photography captures quiet moments of intimacy and hidden beauty, from nudes to still-lifes and intimate self portraits. Scheynius’s work has been showcased in solo exhibitions in Zurich, Tokyo, Oslo, Berlin and London, and her works have featured in group exhibitions at prominent galleries including House of Photography, Hamburg; Centre de la photographie, Geneva; Somerset House, London; and the Foam Museum, Amsterdam. Scheynius used to write a popular weekly photography column for Zeit magazine in Germany, has published nineteen photobooks and has a wide social media following, where she first shares most of her photographs.  

Saskia Vogel born in Los Angeles in 1981, lives in Berlin. She is the author of the novel Permission (Dialogue, 2019), the French translation of which was published in 2025 by La croisée, and the co-creator and deputy editor of the new Erotic Review. Her work has appeared in venues such as Granta, The Paris Review, The New Yorker and The New York Times. An award-winning translator of over two-dozen Swedish books, she was most recently a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for her translation of Linnea Axelsson’s novel-in-verse Ædnan. She is at work on her second novel.