Lucas turns and tosses in his two-piece button-down pajamas, his grey curls burrowed into his feather pillow. He thinks of his mother, and how she would sing him to sleep with a song that later inspired the song of the Ewok mother that was cut from Return of the Jedi but later made a brief appearance in one of the Ewok live-action TV specials. He thinks about what he has to do tomorrow: check the continuity on two Jar Jar Binks coloring books, record a five-second cameo appearance for a sci-fi podcast that has 398,000 downloads per month, and spend quality time with his adopted children.

Today is Star Wars Day, an informal holiday deriving from puns and misinterpretations. He is uneasy about this, since puns and misinterpretations are out of his control. Star Wars is his life’s work, it is his identity and being. He likes to micromanage it. Even enabling discussion boards on the official Star Wars website was an idea it took him a long time to come around to.

No one knows Star Wars like he does. Star Wars is his. Those second-guessers who say that the prequel trilogy were inferior, they don’t understand. They don’t know that, for example, Qui-Gon Jinn has been a stitch in Lucas’s abdomen since 1974, when Lucas first considered the question of who Anakin Skywalker’s teacher was. Qui-Gon Jinn was not brought into being—he has always been.

Lucas thinks of the Holiday Special, and he starts to sweat. It’s all like a terrible nightmare now, a fever dream. His world was spinning out of control. He was drinking Pepsi heavily, and chasing it with aspirin, and when someone said that Art Carney was interested, Lucas didn’t say no. Will it ever go away? Will it ever die? Will the last eighth-generation DVD copy ever be stepped on by a dog and destroyed?

Lucas starts to feel nauseous, and he runs to the toilet, where he heaves dryly. He closes his eyes and remembers his mother. He remembers how perfectly the white robes floated around Carrie Fisher’s compact torso, and he remembers the near-orgasm he had when he first heard John Williams’s score. He should call John. He’ll call John tomorrow. They’ll laugh about Star Wars Day, and the new Thor movie, and their in-jokes about Steven Spielberg’s glasses. It will be okay.

Lucas returns to bed, and unbuttons one of his pajama top buttons. He lies on top of the sheets for a minute, breathing, cooling down. His heart rate returns to normal. It will be okay. He buttons the unbuttoned button, and crawls under the covers. He sleeps the sleep of a baby Ewok.

– Jay Gabler