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