We’re on the corner of O’Connell Bridge, handing out leaflets for the referendum, all greens and reds and blues, inoffensive rainbows, words like VOTE YES FOR A FAIRER IRELAND. We won’t be able to vote; we’re only seventeen. Wearing our YesEquality pins and handing out leaflets and coming out to our elderly relatives is all we can do.

Cars beep in support as they pass us, folks wearing the same pins smile as they walk by, we get hugs and high fives. An older gay couple buys us a whole bag of mini donuts that covers us in powdered sugar and coats our tongues with melted chocolate so everything we say comes out sweet.

“Vote yes for our futures,” Radha calls out. She and Melody are both wearing white sundresses and veils they bought in Oxfam, and haven’t let go of each other’s hands all afternoon. People take pictures. The windows of Dublin city glint in the sunlight, the gold on the top of the domed roofs of the government buildings blinding, the River Liffey reflecting the blue of the sky. On the closed doors of a pub across the road someone has painted a rainbow heart and written the words LOVE IS LOVE inside it.

Beside me, Radha and Melody kiss. Shane holds Matthew tight round the waist. Someone somewhere along the quays is smoking a clove cigarette and my heart lurches when I smell it and remember the neat, looped writing on the playground wall. Did I vote on YOUR marriage?

A middle-aged man walks by and tuts at us. “You kids don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. Matthew laughs and blows a kiss at him but I look away just in time to see the words on the pub door across the road shimmer and change. Just slightly. The letters shift, glow whiter, stretch into the block capitals I know so well. Suddenly, instead of saying LOVE IS LOVE, the words in the rainbow say LOVE NEVER LASTS.

A woman with a buggy bustles by me and behind her are a group of people holding placards. Plastic-backed posters to lash to the lamp posts. Some have gone up already, the same design as the leaflets we’ve been handing out, some with the logos of political parties backing a yes vote. But these aren’t yes posters. These are pictures of sad, dimpled children emblazoned with the words A CHILD DESERVES A MOTHER AND A FATHER. Photos of bright, smiling, straight, white parents with happy dimpled children saying PROTECT IRISH FAMILIES.

My friends start chanting “Love is love! Love is love!” over and over and a whole crowd of shoppers and tourists joins in so that the words beat like the heart of the city but still my eyes are drawn to the words on the door across the road, pulsing with the same beat to new words.

LOVE NEVER LASTS.

I screw my eyes up in the hope they’ll go away but when I open them again the words have only changed.