A strange sense of melancholia

I'm feeling... strange. I just got back from seeing "The History Boys" with Sebethis, and I thought it was brilliant. Thought-provoking, uplifting and then... the ending. It wasn't bad, far from it. It was just that the whole movie had such a sense of hope and aspiration and dreams as the boys went through the preparations for taking their entrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge. And at the end (stop here if you don't want to know)...

...we find out how mundane their lives turn out to be. Even if they aren't mundane. Even though they did succeed, it felt like such a loss. Of the possibilities that are there while going to school. Of the potential futures. Of the subjunctive moments. I feel sad and as if I've lost something. I was choked up at the end not because of any one event, but because of the loss of something ephemeral and something that I felt very personally. And it's not that I'm unhappy because I'm definitely not. It's that there's part of me that I was that I'm never going to be again. There will always be possibility and moments, but those particular ones were a product of a very specific time and place, and they can't be relived, only reinterpreted.