A/N: I don't even really know what this is, but here I am writing it anyway. Enjoy, hopefully!
Don't own this film.
1. Sometimes, Maria can pretend that the heat of the New York sun is the heat of the Puerto Rican sun. It isn't hard to do. Both suns are relentless, tugging sweat from pores and steam from streets, so if Maria pokes her head out a window and closes her eyes, letting the sun cook her cheeks, it's almost as if she is back on la Isla, playing in golden sand and sea-foam. Of course, Puerto Rico and New York are very different - Puerto Rico is sizzling beaches and the mambo, idyllic landscapes and tostones. New York is glimmer and progress, buildings reaching restlessly into the atmosphere like concrete-steel hands and neon signs that in a rainy blur can almost be imagined into a flock of tropical birds, blackhole-like bullet marks scattered throughout the territorial scrawl of graffiti, and laundry hanging from lines like surrender flags. Dreams and brazen hope and that unbridled American promise.
Maria thinks of Puerto Rico often, though it isn't as if she doesn't like America. She does like it there, very much. Anita and her other friends always repeat that in America, anybody can be anything, and even if things aren't the best here, it's better than it was Puerto Rico. It's a beautiful little idea, this America, that they all clutch at as they would rosary beads.
Yes, Maria misses her Puerto Rico but rather likes her America. All the same, it sometimes feels like the American dream had slipped around her like a river parting around rocks. She wants fun and adventure and romance, and to be a real American young lady. But it seems like she's still just a little girl, or at least Bernardo still treats her like one. She wants to be lovely, someone worth paying attention to as a grown-up, not as "Bernardo's little sister". It is a little hard to feel lovely though, sometimes, with all the...whiteness of America. Skin the color of eggshells and lilies is the skin that peers out of beauty magazines and wears the very nice clothes. Bernardo sometimes storms in furiously whistling "The Star-Spangled Banner" or "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and raving about hypocrisy and "those Jets, those idiotas!" Maria usually tunes him out when he's like that, because in America anybody can be anything, right? So even when Bernardo and Chino come home with the days latest racial slurs, emptying them onto the kitchen table like change they don't want, she chooses to think of her skin as the color of a new American penny, even though it sometimes feels more like the color of the city dirt the wind kicks into the sidewalk cracks.
New York - sweet land of liberty.
2. The night arrives when she goes to her first real dance - just the thing real American young ladies go to! She can sense the petty rivalry like an electric web knitting around the dancers, but the competition is such fun to watch and nobody is coming to any harm from it, after all. She is the only girl in the whole place wearing white, which makes her feel childish, and somehow like she is both faded into the background and sticking out too much. But the night still has a sort of glamorous whisper to it, so she holds out hope that it will turn out wonderful.
And among dancers weaving around like brightly colored threads she sees this boy, and has she ever seen anything so beautiful?
They are both spilling over with youth and romanticism, impatiently waiting for love and miracles, waving their arms and crying "Look at me, I'm ready to fall in love! I'm ready to be an adult! I can tolerate every bump or bruise or broken bone that comes with it, cross my heart!" (The question, though, is can you tolerate bullets?)
She walks towards him, as if tugged, and later she will sigh over how it felt like destiny, or fate, or God. What a perfect, New York fairy-tale of a night!
His mere presence seems to have a breathtaking impact. He is young and handsome, more so than his ruddy-faced counterparts, and his skin is tanned by New York's not-quite-Puerto-Rican sun. His hair is black like the pavement after a fresh baptism of rain, and his blue eyes are perfectly rounded chips of sea glass, the same color as the kind that used to wash up on Maria's beach. She has the impression that he has never been called stupid or unimportant in his life, because how could anyone think those things of such a boy? To Tony, she is delicate and soft and very different from his former gang-world of black eyes and busted lips. She is somehow so significant, with dark-honey skin and cherry lips and eyes as dark as untouched plums; a light-footed pixie of a girl dressed in white lace.
And that night they fall in love on the fire escape, singing together beneath a canopy of faraway suns. The glow of the city and of the night sky seems somehow brighter than usual. She loves the way Tony looks at her, as if she is a piece of art, a rare masterpiece that has been missing for centuries and finally uncovered. He loves the softness of Maria's golden palm against his white cheek, how the color-contrast seems so perfect. He marvels at this feeling of once again belonging to something, except this something isn't a gang, it is so much better, because she belongs to him, too. Both of them feel a warm certainty that they will be together forever and ever.
They don't even know each other, really, but how they can ignore the power of the glance they first shared? They adore each other.
Los tontos pobres.
The poor fools.
3. New York is full of boys who wanted to be a part of something, boys who can treat a grimy stretch of street like a kingdom, a group of different-but-not-really-different boys like a diabolical enemy, and fistfights on a playground like a world war. Boys having a gleeful time deciding whether it's best to make the opponent bleed with cans or rocks or blades. Boys marking their territory in diamond-shiny spray paint which will dim in a matter of days. Boys searching for something in the words "I'm a Jet" or "Soy un Shark" and never quite finding it. It makes them seem almost innocent - children trying too hard to be all grown-up.
It's all a devilishly fun game of camaraderie and dominance, except the schoolboy match of tag blazes wilder and more dangerous, pushing at the brinks of each other's courage, until the loser's penalty spirals into death.
For hatred is scary and knives are scary, but God, what a rush, what an elixir that fear is! And when death shows its vulture claw in the space beneath the highway, there is no love, none of the most beautiful sound you ever heard, only Riff; brave, lively Riff dead and vanished into the wavering heat of a New York night, and that is not Maria's brother for there is no Maria anymore, only Riff's corpse (God, what a word, corpse, and how suddenly this corpse came into existence!) and only a murderer with blood like juice still on his fingers and you hate him YOU HATE HIM and Riff has slipped the knife into your fingers, and you are wildly drunk on the blood and the fury thundering in your head and the roar of the two schoolboy gangs and you remember why you started the Jets in the first place because how incredible it is to be part of a wild, youthful mass, and surely it is your goddamn noble duty to stab that murderer and somehow buy back Riff's life with his, and for a millisecond, as the knife delves cleanly into his body as into butter, you tingle with a savage euphoria because you have had revenge, but - no - the sirens scream and now there are just two bodies emptying themselves of warmth, of life, and they are no longer humans but chilled immobile slabs of meat, food for the flies, and you have killed a man and the man is Maria's brother, flesh of her flesh - no -
Maria - Maria - Maria -
4. Suddenly everything is all wrong. Maria prays feverishly, madly, because her brother is dead and her Tony is the one who made him that way. She cannot imagine a Bernardo with still blood and vacant eyes, who will never try again to protect her in that stifling way he always did. But it is even harder for her to imagine Tony as a killer, for "Tony" is a word which embodies all the magical, enchanting things that make him him, and she cannot link that name and the word "murderer" together. It is as if her brain physically cannot do it. Tony is a being who belongs in places of beauty, like fire escapes and bridal shops, not under highways with a knife in his hands. She is so ripped apart she would rather die than believe it -
Then he comes to her and he feels all wrong, somehow changed, but she has to hold onto him because she feels like a corpse, too, like she is beside her brother with a bloody wound in her stomach and all her life weeping out of her, and oh, Tony; his lips are made of opium and he doesn't even know it but she needs him she needs him she needs him.
And they exchange virginities while Bernardo and Riff lie dead, and as his hands glide over her ribs she tries not to imagine a blade shoved through them, and as his fingers interlace with hers she tries not to feel the blood they must've worn, and they both try so desperately to reknit their love with the force of their mouths and to halt the inevitable, brutal unraveling.
5. Oh, of course love won't (will) die.