On the lamp posts and the walls around the no posters we write words that become slogans that become love poems to the city.

Around the posters shouting A CHILD DESERVES A MOTHER AND A FATHER we write a child deserves equality. We write:

a child deserves

to see

herself

reflected

in the windows of the city.

Around the posters shrieking PROTECT CHILDREN we write protect children from bigots. We write:

protect children

from ever having

to be told

that they are less

because of who they love

We write love. We write love is love. We write:

love is

love

is

the beaming bars

of the

Ha’Penny Bridge

through which

two girls kiss

over the long

green locks

of the Liffey

We write:

love is

love

is

Stephen’s Green

in summer:

two boys holding

a 99 each

in one hand,

the other

hand

holding

the other

Angel’s right, this is about more than marriage. It’s about more than romance. It’s about words and hearts and rainbows. It’s about beeping cars and strangers’ high fives. It’s about powdered sugar donuts and elderly relatives learning tolerance.

It’s about two girls with roses in the belt buckles of their jeans and spray paint on their fingers, writing love poems without needing to be in, or even believe in, love, and the city rewarding us with blinding white letters splashed across its buildings saying YOU ARE PART OF THE CITY’S HEART.

9.

We meet at the school gates the morning of our mock referendum, a week before the real thing. Me and Kate, Melody and Radha, Matthew and Shane. We give the finger to every no poster on the way down the road. The principal calls a free class and the whole school crowds around the assembly hall to vote. Students and teachers, staff and caretakers and gardeners, the parent volunteers from the library and the canteen.

The yes vote wins by a landslide.

When Kate and I come home from school our dad is in the kitchen. He and Mum are drinking tea and talking quietly. My sister rushes in to them but I go straight to my room, call Radha, talk to her on the phone until I’m sure that my dad and the last of his boxes are gone.

But later that evening when he texts me I answer. And when he replies I answer back.

The following morning there are even more no posters on the lamp posts in the road outside our school. I left all my mum’s spray paints with Angel so I can’t write under them and anyway I’m not sure I’ve any love poems left. Giving them the finger isn’t enough but they’re too high to spit on.

The walls of Dublin are strangely silent, as if they still think that we shouldn’t bother, that marriage is a sham, that love never lasts, that nothing we can do will change that.

Which is why I’m surprised that Angel is the first person I see when Kate and I come up to the school, just inside the main gates. She’s standing in the middle of the driveway, blocking the cars from coming in, her and Radha and Melody, Shane and Matthew and the rest of the LGBT society. In front of them all Angel’s lined up a row of spray-paint cans like the ones my mum’s been using on our furniture, only these are in bright primary colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. When we walk up she hands them around and we all work together to cover the ground of the gate in front of the army of hateful no posters with the largest, brightest rainbow we can paint.