Pills have also gotten into my novelistic imagination. I've got a whole novel about pill-popping orphans called The Leave-Takers that I've essentially given up on and parceled out into short fiction. At least for now. 

Its protagonists are both in prolonged states of mourning over their dead parents (does that sound familiar?) and are quite obsessed with the objects of the dead. Jacob Nassedrine and Laynie Jackman also have small but ferocious pill-popping habits they have a hard time shaking. 

You can read about Jacob's problem or about Laynie's problem, and remember that All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. 

I'm lucky that their problems aren't mine, and that I've found a way to explore the paths that I haven't slipped down. The act of empathizing with people in fiction is a great way to understand other people, but it's also a great way to understand who you didn't become and why.