A footnote that became a small confession

Working on a novel where the narrator keeps misremembering a lullaby. The original lets the wrong words linger for pages before correcting them. I spent the whole morning trying to find an English equivalent that would carry the same ache, and ended up writing a footnote that admits, fairly baldly, that some cargo just doesn't survive the crossing. Not a breakthrough, exactly. More like learning to carry the loss differently.