At the very beginning of what was to be a very bad year, my partner of seven years ended our relationship. It seems like a strange idea that when two people have been making choices together for so long one of them is allowed to just change their mind. May I suggest a law that says you have to spend as long breaking up with someone as half the amount of time you dated them? It’s not a good law, but I like the idea of paying homage to something. I am also comfortable with prolonging grief.

I left the house that January morning as a person of a duo. An hour later I was single. For a long time it seemed significant to me that I’d left the house that morning to buy a diary. I’d look at the pages and wish it was October because I was sure that at least by then I’d feel a bit better. We spoke a lot in the first few weeks; I would cry and tell him it was a huge mistake, that people didn’t just end relationships where they loved each other – they worked on them.

For a long time I felt like glass: my mind was sharp and cold. The worst days were Saturdays. We had spent our Saturdays in a familiar and comforting routine, one he continued to observe. I hated that it didn’t kill him to keep it – that I was awake on those mornings and knew exactly where he was, but no idea where I was.

Camps Bay. Photograph: Alice Buckley

After a breakup you get strange ideas about yourself. You decide to reinvent yourself. People almost always start running. And flossing. A friend suggested to me that we try and swim in a different tidal pool every Saturday and so, with the help of very cold water and my friends, I started to reinvent myself, or rather my Saturdays. We began these swims in January, when Cape Town hums with heat and there is the respite of a warm rock to lie on after a swim in a sea – the Atlantic Ocean – that is relentlessly freezing.

People in Cape Town use the word “swim” very loosely. To them it means they got into the water, perhaps even went under it and got their hair wet. The whole process takes about 10 seconds. Our first swim at Camps Bay tidal pool was a great success; a whole length was swum. It felt extremely brave.

Davies Pool. Photograph: Emma Withers

I can remember every single one of these pools and how I was feeling when I swam in them. I stood on sea urchins and had a group of tourists applaud my bravery during a swim in the rain. One Saturday, after I’d forced my unflappable eight-year-old niece to join me for a swim, she told me that water has memory.

This is not something that is accepted by the scientific community, but was happily accepted by me.

We saw each other and it was painful and confusing. He had startlingly quickly started seeing someone else and I finally moved my things out of what had been our house. I took all my friends with me and we put on Alanis Morissette; it felt simultaneously appalling and delightful. We took down the curtains in the bedroom, a move that seemed vicious and satisfying. We drank quite a lot and afterwards we went for a swim in a tidal pool in Sea Point. It wasn’t a good pool. As we arrived a seagull shat in the water and I thought EXACTLY, this is my life now: I am sad in a dirty tidal pool and even that ecstatic bird the seagull knows it.

I think my niece was right. Water has memory

He took me for dinner a month-and-a-half after we broke up and said he wanted to get back together. I was apprehensive and delighted. Shortly afterwards he told me it was a mistake. I sought the counsel of an angel reader. My message to her read: “Hi could you please see me as soon as possible, I would love some guidance because I’m feeling very lost.” I started going to therapy twice a week. The therapist’s advice and the angel reader’s advice was basically the same except the angel reader told me I’d meet someone with connections to India.

I considered going to India to speed up the process. I started seeing someone who had no connections to India, but was fun and treated me kindly. I started running and spending more time alone in a new flat in Sea Point that was decorated like Miami in the 80s. I bought a water filter, which felt very powerful.

Fick’s Pool. Photograph: Emma Withers

I almost became a firefighter and started making my life more full of the things I love. I swam and swam, and as the weeks went on I started to identify as someone who loved cold water – part of a secret club. I learned to stay in for longer. I swam through the winter; I even swam after a huge storm where the sand felt like ice and my whole body turned the colour of a bruise. I got to see parts of Cape Town I had never been to; I travelled outside the city to pools I didn’t know existed.

The montage of me getting well isn’t quite real though. This is not the story of some sort of revelation that can help me or anyone get over losing a person they love. You can read all the books about pain and the quotes about being enough and buy all the good dresses and fill yourself up with so much stuff and wisdom that is supposed to help you, but there is basically nothing in this world that fixes losing a person you love, except for time.

The truth is that I spent a year of my life waiting for someone to want to be with me again. I spent a year making some good decisions, but mainly I spent a year reacting to how someone else treated me. Ultimately I got what I wanted: I got my partner back, but very quickly he left me again. It was painful, but I had training wheels on for it.

Maidens Cove. Photograph: Emma Withers

I spent two Januaries losing the person I had considered to be the love of my life, but this time I actually decided to try and get better properly, to relinquish control and to stop blaming someone for hurting me and realise that I could love them very deeply always, but that didn’t mean I could be with them, that how I loved someone didn’t need to be determined by how they loved me.

I think my niece was right. Water has memory and so every tidal pool I visited has me in it: my sadness and anger and my regret for a person I loved who was careless with me. It has my friends in it, all their kindness and goodness and love for me. I can return to any of these tidal pools whenever I want to and I like to think that the water will remember me and welcome me, its particles will shift a bit and I will feel safe and moved by how sometimes just a cold swim in the morning with your friends – a change in routine – is enough.

How everything will be exactly as it should.

• Emma Withers lives in Cape Town where she works in the music industry