Care, cura, is double-edged: it names the tenderness of turning toward others and the burden of staying with.

In this issue of Tendon, contributors attend to the material and temporal textures of care: choreographies of assessments and paperwork, recalibration of relationships as parents age and children become caregivers, afterlives of voicemails and recipes and memory itself. These pieces depict care as something to be practiced, as an embodiment of labor and expertise, as a complex inheritance, as interlaced with harm and neglect. Form, too, becomes a site of care. Scripts, fragments, visions, and hybrid forms register what cannot be held by linear narrative alone. Realism abuts the uncanny as authors follow care to its limits, where it strains, fractures, or becomes impossible to sustain. What emerges is an aesthetics of care attuned to ambivalence, where staying near others is both an act of devotion and a site of profound risk.