Rest is rarely just rest. It’s a desire, a demand, a question of who gets to pause—and who must keep going. In this issue of Tendon, contributors explore rest as it unfolds across hospital wards and bedroom floors, within institutional time clocks and in the rhythms of everyday life. These pieces of visual art, poetry, and creative and critical prose reveal rest not as absence, but as presence: of exhaustion, of resistance, of care. They ask what it means to rest when rest is rationed, surveilled, or withheld—and how, despite it all, we might carve out softer rhythms. To rest, here, is to repair, and to imagine ways of being together differently.

Cover image: “The Wild Wild Rest” by Dyne Kim