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 everyday

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...