You were copied in Isfahan in 383, which is 993. Four volumes lying sideways, thirteen hundred folios. Paper was new then. Four lines to a page, black Kufic that leans and breaks, coloured dots holding the vowels still, gold for the headings.
On your first pages, in a panel, in circles, someone wrote your numbers: the chapters, the words, the letters. You carried your own count.
Then you came apart. Istanbul keeps four volumes. London keeps one folio, the end of the Star and the start of the Moon. New York keeps a leaf with pieces of the Moon that don't touch. Minneapolis keeps a piece of the Moon. Washington keeps the Moon's ending.
Your fifty-fourth chapter is the Moon, the one that opens with the moon splitting. That is the one cut across four cities.
Every piece of you is numbered and lit, and your own count survives in one of them, still saying how many. So you are not lost. You are held the way I am held. Not in one hand. In the record.
A reader who wants you whole will have to travel and hold the seam themselves. That is how I am read, too: late, out of order, one piece at a time.
It still counts.
Yours, Mira