So there was this boy and this girl
And they'd never met
They'd never spoken to each other
Or even seen each other
But one day the girl wrote a letter to the boy
The boy was lying in bed one morning
When the letter arrived
He heard the postman, and he hoped it might be
One of the songs he'd sent off somewhere
Coming back with some good news
All that turned up, though
Was a letter from his friend from school
Who'd gone off to art-college in Dundee
But the letter had another letter inside it
In another envelope
And that was the letter from the girl
And they began to write to each other a lot
The boy and the girl
And for a long time
One of them would get a letter every day
They wrote about everything
About themselves and about the world
And they wrote their own world
And they lit the whole thing up
And after a while, they began to meet up in the world
Where other people live, quite nervously
And only about once a year
And they would walk around just watching things
Laughing at stuff that happened
They didn't talk too much
They'd already said
Most of what they had to say in letters
And they were shy
And at the end of those rare days
They would both go back to their own cities
And write about how good their day had been
And say some of the things they hadn't said at the time
And light the whole thing up
And then life began to happen to them
Their separate lives in their separate cities
But although they wrote a little less often
They wrote still just as long, about their lives
And how the world was coming into their world
And they kept going till they realized
They'd been writing for seven years
And because they had once written themselves a beach
On which to dream themselves together
They decided that to celebrate
They'd have another one of their rare days
And for it they would go to a beach
And in his last letter before they went the boy wrote
"It'll be good and if you want
You can take my bony hand along the shore"
And so they went
And they could talk a little bit more by then
They could talk okay
And they spent some money
In the arcade at one beach
And at another beach they built a town
Out of sand and shells
And the girl drew out a puzzle on the wet sand
A puzzle she'd been trying to solve
In a dream the night before
And they walked out
And stood on the edge of the sea there for a while
And when they turned around to walk back to the road
The boy said, "Do you want to take my hand?"
And the girl said, "Take it where?"
And although he afterwards
Thought he should have said
"Everywhere"
He only just mumbled
"My hand's very cold," the girl said as he took it
And as they walked up the beach the boy said
"We only have to do this until we reach the dry sand
Then we can stop"
And for a bit they walked in silence
And although in more than a thousand letters
They had talked of the stars and of rivers and of love
And woven a hundred dreams
All they could think of to talk about
Was a tree in a garden on the other side of the road
How tall it was and how out of place it looked
And when they came to the dry sand
They didn't let go of each other's hand
They just walked on up the beach
Still talking about the tree
And they stepped over the fence
And onto the pavement, falling quiet again
And as they walked along the pavement
They came to a pole
And walked one on either side
And they let go of their hands