Everyone in Town Looks Like Me

I found the town by accident—or maybe it found me.

It was supposed to be a simple weekend drive. Just me, my thoughts, and a map I never looked at. I’d been burned out for months: no calls, no love, no real direction. So I let the road lead me, hoping to outrun the noise inside my head.

After hours of weaving through empty backroads and thickening fog, I spotted a faded wooden sign on the roadside.

“Welcome to Dalemar. Population: 3,014.”

I'd never heard of it.

Curiosity—and the growing need to pee—made me turn in.

The first thing I noticed was the quiet. Not peaceful quiet. Watchful quiet. The kind that presses in from all sides. The streets were still. The houses looked aged, but lived-in. No gas stations. No fast-food joints. Just a long main street and rows of tidy porches.

And then I saw her.

A woman in a green coat crossing the street with a paper bag. Her profile caught my eye—not because she was pretty, though she was—but because she looked exactly like me.

Same nose. Same sharp chin. Same stiff posture I’d developed from too many years behind a desk.

She glanced at me and smiled politely, then kept walking.

I sat in my car, stunned. Maybe it was the fog. Maybe she was just familiar-looking. That happens, right?

I shook it off and parked.

I walked into what seemed like a small general store. A bell chimed above the door.

The man behind the counter looked up.

He had my face.

Older, maybe by twenty years, with deeper lines and heavier eyes—but it was unmistakably me.

“Need help with something?” he asked, with a grin.

My throat dried up. “Uh… just passing through.”

He nodded and looked back down at a newspaper.

I turned to leave, but another customer brushed past me. A teenage boy, lanky and awkward, but still—me. Younger, sure. But I knew my own face when I saw it.

By the time I stepped back outside, I counted six more people who looked like me.

Old women, kids, men in coveralls, teenagers on bikes. All versions of me. Different ages. Different hair. Different clothes. But all me.

My stomach twisted.

I rushed back to my car and peeled away down the street, heart thudding. But something strange happened. The road curved back… into the town again.

I circled twice, maybe three times, before I realized: I couldn’t leave.

The signs shifted. The turns looped. No matter how far I drove, Dalemar folded in on itself like a maze drawn by someone who wanted me lost.

Eventually, I gave up and pulled into a motel that looked like it hadn’t changed since the ’60s. The clerk—my mirror image, wearing reading glasses—handed me a key without a word.

Inside the room, I stared at my reflection in the mirror. But the reflection blinked before I did.

It smiled.

“I’ve been waiting,” it said.

I stumbled back, heart racing.

“What is this place?” I whispered.

“You already know.”

“No, I don’t!”

The reflection tilted its head.

“Every version of you that could have been… is here.”

The lights flickered. My ears rang.

“This town,” it continued, “is built on all the choices you didn’t make. All the lives you didn’t live. You don’t remember them—but they remember you.”

“Why now? Why me?”

“You’re fractured,” it said simply. “You’ve lived your life avoiding yourself. Now you’re meeting who you could have been.”

The next morning, I walked through Dalemar again. It was less terrifying now, but no less surreal.

I saw myself as a baker. As a mother. As a man. As an artist painting sunflowers on a shop window.

Every version of me had found a life, a purpose, a path. Some smiled as I passed. Others ignored me completely.

That evening, as the sun dipped low, I returned to the sign where I’d first entered.

The numbers had changed.

“Population: 3,015.”

I don’t know if I ever really left Dalemar.

Maybe I’m still there. Maybe I became one of them—just another me walking those looping streets, existing between regrets and what-ifs.

Or maybe Dalemar lives inside me now—a place I visit every time I ask myself, What if I’d said yes? What if I’d stayed? What if I hadn’t been afraid?

All I know is this:

Every choice we don’t make leaves a shadow behind.

And sometimes… those shadows find each other.