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.

From Looper. I can’t say I’m a fan of the musical/spoken word style, but the lyrics fill me with an inexpressable longing.