My mother was dead, she had been for two years already. Stella only contacted me because the house my mother lived in was set to be demolished. She said she thought I deserved to look at it. I can’t say I never wondered why my mother walked out. I was only a baby when she left, so I never got to know anything about her that might’ve offered some reasoning. My father didn’t know or care where she had gone.

Stella’s letter was accompanied by a set of keys and a plane ticket. My mother had moved to Japan, lived there for the rest of her life. But she knew about me, who I had become. I reread the letter countless times on the plane ride. In some cruel twist of fate, my father and mother had died in the same year, together to the end. When I got to the house it was already night.

I can’t remember much from then, except that I rifled through the house and looked at my mother’s belongings. Much of her life I could piece out from the pictures hanging on the wall. She had found another husband, had two more children. I had half-siblings. It felt strange to see my mother’s life like this, like it was a forgotten distant thing. Stella had said she was the only person that had been told about me. I wondered if my mother struggled like I did, if she sometimes had trouble forgetting about me. Maybe to her, I was just a stranger that she knew was somewhere out in the world.

I entered my mother’s room to sleep for the night. The bed hadn’t been used for a while, that much was obvious. When I opened the nightstand, I found a folder inside filled with papers. They were pictures and printed out slips of my achievements that my mother had taken from various sources. There was a photo of me for every age except the last two; someone must have been sending them to her. In a lot of these pictures, I had been wondering how it would feel to share the moment with her. I supposed I always did, though I didn’t know it. I spent the night asking myself if I would’ve preferred to meet my mother in person before she died. I didn’t really know the answer, not even in my heart.

The next morning, I saw a vending machine on a street close to the house. Stella had said my mother loved Japanese vending machines, the snacks they had in them. This one was filled with canned cakes. The cans were transparent, but all you could see was the cream and the layers on the ends. I bought two, opening them up to find what was hidden in the middle. One was strawberry, the other cheesecake. I thought if I looked hard enough, I might’ve found a lifetime in one of them.