I didn’t break all at once. It happened slowly, like a rope fraying strand by strand until one day it simply gives way. By the time everything collapsed, I was already carrying too much — abandonment, financial abuse, exhaustion, four children depending on me, and a mind stretched thin from trying to hold a life together on my own. I was stressed, scared, and slipping into a darkness I didn’t yet have a name for. And then something else hit me, something I couldn’t explain, something that made the ground tilt beneath my feet.

I kept trying to put the pieces together, to make sense of what was happening around me. But the more I tried, the more the world seemed to warp. I found myself asking questions that had no answers.

Controllers. Controllers. Who are the controllers?

Who are the best hackers in the world?

Who knows every ringtone ever made?

Who breaks rules for sport?

Who plays games with people’s lives?

And what are the rules anyway?

No lying.

No stealing.

No cheating.

Those were the rules I lived by — rules that suddenly felt like they belonged to another universe entirely.

At first, I thought it was just my imagination. Stress. Paranoia. The mind under siege. But then the events began stacking up, one on top of another, until they formed a shape I couldn’t ignore.

One night in quiet seaside town where we were living, after hanging out the laundry, I sat behind the house at 10 Luis Echevarría. The children were asleep. The night was thick and black, the kind of darkness that swallows sound. And then a drone dropped out of the sky — just a few metres away — and hovered there, watching me. It stayed long enough for my skin to crawl. Long enough for me to feel like someone, somewhere, was looking straight through me.

It wasn’t the only time.

By the river.

At the beach.

In the quiet moments when I thought I was finally alone.

Drones are everywhere now — a global swarm of buzzing metal insects. Billions spent on machines while millions go hungry. A 2025 UN report called it a “failure of humanity,” and I believe that. But knowing drones are common didn’t make the feeling go away. It didn’t stop the sense that something was circling me, closing in.

So who were they?

Who plays games with a mother of four?

Who sabotages someone already on her knees?

Who watches, interferes, disrupts, without ever showing their face?

Were they bored?

Cruel?

Or was there another explanation entirely?

We were just an ordinary Australian family. My ex-husband was a retired military officer. We travelled quietly, kept to ourselves. Well — almost. We did argue at the Mexico City airport when we first arrived. I cried. I took the children and sat at a restaurant until he calmed down. There were cameras everywhere, but I doubt anyone cared. Mexico was supposed to be safe for tourists. Why would anything go wrong?

Sometimes I wondered if ghosts had been hired to destroy my life. But who would bother? I wasn’t important. I wasn’t wealthy. I wasn’t powerful. I was just a mother trying to survive.

And then there was the other possibility — the one that scared me the most.

That it was all in my imagination.

That the coincidences were just coincidences.

That the fear had twisted my perception.

People who knew me then might say it was the drugs. But what if there were no drugs? What if I was simply a woman abandoned in a foreign country, financially trapped, terrified, depressed, anxious, and trying to protect four children alone? What if the world around me had become so unstable that my mind started filling in the blanks?

When he left, my entire world inverted. And something — whether real or imagined — stepped into the empty space. Something that played with shadows and silence. Something that made me doubt myself. Something that made me feel watched, manipulated, toyed with.

So I write.

To lay out the facts.

To share the events as they happened.

To risk ridicule rather than carry this alone.

Because just because something sounds delusional doesn’t mean it didn’t feel real. And just because I can’t prove it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. If I imagined it all — fine. Lock me up and throw away the key. But if I didn’t? Then someone out there knows exactly what they did.

I’ve never been a storyteller. I don’t embellish. I don’t invent drama. Anyone who knows me knows that. So I ask the reader for one thing: the benefit of the doubt. Especially if you’ve never lived through the underworld of fear, isolation, and psychological pressure.

And to the authorities — I’m not hiding.

Interview me.

Interrogate me.

I want the truth as much as anyone.

WHO ARE YOU?

Oh great Masters of the Universe.

They had many names — the X-Men, the roosters, the dogs, the geckos, the dragonflies, the originals, the pink team, the black team, the Pokémon team, the Brady Bunch. They were everything and nothing. They communicated in ways I still struggle to explain. It was like messages passed through static, through symbols, through the edges of perception.

We had a strange relationship — part love, part hate. They were my enemies and my companions, my tormentors and my entertainers. Some of them felt angry, like they resented the task of sabotaging me. Their anger buzzed like chainsaws in the night. Others coped by turning everything into a joke — clowns, tricksters, quirky and unpredictable, like handmade parota furniture: each one unique, each one impossible to replicate.

They were masters of mind games.

And that’s what terrifies me the most — that my story will be dismissed because mind games are hard to explain, hard to prove, hard to believe. That the truth will be lost because it doesn’t fit neatly into a police report.

I don’t know how to carry this alone.

I don’t know how to speak without risking everything.

I don’t know how to tell the truth without losing my children forever.

And the man I love is in Mexico.

Speaking about any of this might mean I never see him again.

But silence has its own cost.

And I’ve paid enough already.