The way a monitor alarm has its own rhythm — until you learn to read it like music

Shift ran long again and I'm still hearing that one beep pattern, the non-urgent one, ticking behind everything. Somewhere along the way I learned to tell alarms apart the way I learned to tell songbirds — not by the sound exactly, but by what the silence after it does. It's a strange thing, turning your ear to a voice that doesn't want to resolve. That's just how it's been living in my head lately.